The price of the infamous Dogecoin (DOGE) leapt 35% in a matter of minutes on April 1st, after a new tweet from Tesla CEO, Elon Musk. Musks’ enthusiasm for cryptocurrency as a whole and accumulating Bitcoin has become increasingly well-known with each comment and tweet glorifying cryptoassets going viral.
Musk, who has been aptly nicknamed the “Technoking”, is known for his stunts on Twitter and in interviews that have already influenced the altcoin’s price.
However, this was the most brazen case of “memeing” a digital assets price to the moon, as Musk vowed that his other business, SpaceX would “put a literal Dogecoin on the literal moon.”
As of the tweet, Dogecoin quickly stated to climb in price, hitting a high of $0.07 before cooling off but retaining its gains. DOGE began the year at $0.004, and its year-to-date gains as of April 1 stood at more than 1,500%.
AirBaltic a Latvian national carrier service made an extremely rare move to begin accepting DOGE as payment for flight bookings. However, the airliner has been accepting Bitcoin for payments dating back to 2014.
Meanwhile, Musk has positioned himself in hot water over his tweets, as news surfaced in February that he was under investigation by US authorities.
However, Musk said that it primarily his promotion of Dogecoin that had caused him to lead himself into trouble. The idea of clamping down on possible manipulations on crypto market investments continues to be a touchy subject for many amateur investors in the wake of the Reddit-Gamestop ordeal, in which trading platforms suspended investors from transacting in an apparent ad hoc manner when their trading led to heavy volatility.
