Can You Buy a Tesla With Dogecoin? Elon Musk Drops a Cryptocurrency Bombshell
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Dawn Allcot
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T. Woods
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If you’re planning to buy a Tesla, you may soon have another way to fund your purchase. Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently hinted at enabling Dogecoin cryptocurrency purchases for Tesla vehicles.
During Musk’s reent visit to the Tesla Berlin Gigafactory, an audience member during a Q&A asked about purchasing a Tesla with Dogecoin.
“At some point I think we should enable that,” Musk replied.
The cryptocurrency Dogecoin was first released in 2013, based on a famous meme of a cute Shibu Inu who would share his thoughts in comic sans font. The coin gained widespread attention in 2019, when billionaire Elon Musk declared Doge his “fav cryptocurrency” in a Twitter post.
In 2021, one investor who purchased $250,000 worth of the coin became a crypto millionaire. At its highest price, Doge reached 73 cents per coin in May 2021. Today, Doge is trading at just 19 cents, according to CoinMarketCap.com data.
During his speech in Berlin, Musk showed his support of the coin, cheering, “Dogecoin to the moon.” However, his endorsement didn’t send the coin soaring, as it has been hovering between 15 and 22 cents for most of the spring, up from 7 cents earlier this year.
There is precedent for Tesla supporting crypto as a form of payment. In 2021, Tesla briefly accepted Bitcoin to purchase vehicles, but discontinued the program after just a few months. “Tesla has suspended vehicle purchases using Bitcoin. We are concerned about rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining and transactions, especially coal, which has the worst emissions of any fuel,” Musk shared in a post on Twitter/X.
At the time he wrote, “We are also looking at other cryptocurrencies that use <1% of Bitcoin’s energy/transaction.”
Dogecoin uses the same consensus model as Bitcoin, since it’s an alt-coin based on the Bitcoin blockchain. But it doesn’t create emissions on the same scale as Bitcoin, which could make it a better alternative than Bitcoin for Tesla transactions.
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