DOGE surges as Elon Musk says he’s working with devs to ‘improve efficiency’

Elon Musk’s latest foray into crypto markets came a few hours ago when he tweeted he is working with the Dogecoin developers to improve the cryptocurrency’s efficiency.

“Working with Doge devs to improve system transaction efficiency. Potentially promising.”

According to CoinGecko, the price climbed 26% from $0.38 this morning to $0.48 at the time of writing.

The tweet’s reference to “efficiency” seemed to lend weight to the idea Tesla may add Dogecoin (DOGE) as a form of payment after the CEO noted on Thursday the firm is looking at greener cryptocurrencies that use less than 1% of Bitcoin’s energy per transaction.

TradingView responded to Musk’s tweet by noting Dogecoin’s market capitalization had ballooned $10 billion in the immediate aftermath. Dogecoin’s market cap was sitting at roughly $49 billion at 6 am on Friday and has since increased to $66.7 billion as of this writing, an increase of almost $18 billion.

The market cap of Dogecoin spiked $10 billion after this tweet. pic.twitter.com/cqMA1irxSm

— TradingView (@tradingview) May 13, 2021

Another factor in the price rise could have been the news that Coinbase is planning to list the cult-favorite memecoin on the exchange within the next six to eight weeks.

JUST NOW: Coinbase to add Dogecoin in the next 6 to 8 weeks says Brian Armstrong on Q1 earnings call

— Bloqport (@Bloqport) May 13, 2021

Appearing on CNBC’s Mad Money show on Thursday, Coinbase chief financial officer Alesia Hass was questioned “Should investors take Dogecoin seriously?” with Hass answering the exchange should leave that decision up to its investors:

“We are a platform. We want to offer all assets that meet our listing standards and we hope to be the place where you can come and trade anything that you want to trade.”

Dog tokens boom

Interest in DOGE has sparked the creation of various copycat tokens including Shiba Inu (SHIB), Husky (HUSKY) and Akita Inu (AKITA).

Akita Inu gained 32,933% in 30 days and hit its all-time high on Tuesday of $0.00002904. The price has since taken a sharp hit of 72.6% down to $0.00000787 on Friday. The trading volume over the past 24 hours was a mammoth $177 million according to CoinGecko.

SHIB has also been garnering a lot of attention from retail investors of late, with data from CoinGecko showing that $5.4 million worth of SHIB traded hands in the past 24 hours. The price plunged after Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin gave away vast amounts of the token on Wednesday. Despite its volatility, SHIBA is still up 12,263% since its inception.

r/dogecoin hijacks Google image results

Users of subreddit r/dogecoin have collectively gamed Google’s image search rankings to show a picture of Doge when people search “one dollar” on the search engine.

The harmless prank is based on a long-held meme (and goal) for Dogecoin to hit $1 . We tested it out, and sure enough, the cute Shiba is there amid the greenbacks.