Dogecoin Surges 12% As Tesla Starts Accepting DOGE For Merch

Dogecoin surges 12% moments after Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk announced that the company will accept DOGE for merchandise payments so let’s read more in today’s dogecoin news.

The price of Dogecoin surges 12% to a new monthly high after it reacted to the news that the coin will be used for payments at the Tesla store. Tesla CEO Elon Musk shared the news on Twitter and announced that users can now buy merch with Doge. According to the data from CoinGEcko, DOGE increased 16% earlier on Friday to an intraday high of $0.200369 before falling to $0.192 at the time of writing. Despite the slide, the price of DOGE is now at levels last seen in December when Musk initially started teasing about the integration:

“Tesla will make some merch buyable with Doge & see how it goes.”

Tesla merch buyable with Dogecoin

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 14, 2022

This is the fifth day of gains for the coin which is now up 23.8% over the past week. The latest price action also saw DOGE flip Avalanche to become the market’s 11^th biggest crypto by market cap. There are a few items available at the Tesla store that users can pay with DOGE including the Giga Texas Belt Buckle, Cyberwhistle, and kids Cybersquad that is available for 12,020 DOGE. Tesla also started accepting BItcoin last year for its electric vehicles but the company gave up on the idea because of the environmental concerns regarding the top cryptocurrency.

Musk who described himself as the “Dogefather” has a long relationship with the meme coin. The Tesla chief advocated for Dogecoin and pushed the idea of using crypto for payments. At the same time, the rocket company SpaceX announced a Moon Mission in 2022 with the payload being paid with the meme coin. Musk suggested that DOGE could beat BTC revealing that he partnered with Doge developers while trying to make the crypto much cheaper and more energy-friendly. Dogecoin benefited from Musk’s interest with the tweets sending the coin up on a few occasions.

As recently reported, Elon Musk revealed that Dogecoin is better than Bitcoin in speaking to Lex Fridman, he talked about a lot of other things as well like colonizing Mars and Tesla’s autopilot functionality. However, the stand-out topic of conversation was his thought on the popular meme coin. While purists continue to slam DOGE because of its poor fundamentals, Musk said that its weakest attributes are actually its strengths.