Elon Musk now lets you buy Tesla merch in Dogecoin, sends meme-based crypto value soaring

TESLA CEO Elon Musk has announced that customers can now buy select items of merchandise using Dogecoin, causing the crypto to soar.

The meme-based cryptocurrency jumped 18% following the announcement on Friday.

Elon Musk’s Tesla is now accepting Dogecoin as payment for merch

“Tesla merch buyable with Dogecoin,” Musk tweeted on Friday

Some of the purchasable merch with Dogecoin include the Cyberquad for Kids (12,020 Doge, or about $2,320), the Giga Texas Belt Buckle (835 Doge, or about $161), and the Cyberwhistle (300 Doge, or about $58).

Musk initially announced that Dogecoin would be used as currency for merch on a test basis in a mid-December tweet.

That announcement also sent the value of the meme-based crypto soaring by more than 20%.

It is unclear if Doge, which Musk has asserted time and again might be his “favorite crypto,” would ever be used for the purchase of Telsa Vehicles

Tesla did accept Bitcoin as acceptable currency for a little over a month in February 2021 but quickly halted the practice citing concerns around Bitcoin’s ecological footprint.

“Cryptocurrency is a good idea on many levels and we believe it has a promising future, but this cannot come at great cost to the environment,” Elon Musk said in a statement.

Dogecoin mining, on the other hand, does not even scratch the surface when it comes to the amount of energy Bitcoin consumes but that doesn’t mean it won’t one day, according to TRG Datacenters,

Musk has been very vocal in his support for the meme-based crypto, and he even plans to send a SpaceX satellite named DOGE-1 to the moon in the future.

“Lots of people I talked to on the production lines at Tesla or building rockets at SpaceX own Doge,” Musk told CNBC in October.

“They aren’t financial experts or Silicon Valley technologists. That’s why I decided to support Doge, it felt like the people’s crypto,” he added.

GettyDogecoin became popular after Dogecoin-memes started take over the internet[/caption]

In other news, China has built an ‘artificial moon’ to train its astronauts for future missions.

A rugby ball-shaped planet has been spotted outside our Solar System and scientists are calling it deformed.

And, Nasa thinks the James Webb Space Telescope will likely be hit by space debris.