Electric carmaker Tesla to accept Dogecoin as payment for merchandise

Tesla and SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk recently tweeted everyone who wants to purchase Tesla merchandise can also pay using Dogecoin cryptocurrency. Just before noon on 14 Jan, Musk tweeted, "Tesla merch buyable with Dogecoin."

Tesla merchandise includes apparel such as the 'Giga Texas belt buckle' (price 835 Doge) 'Cyberquad for kids' (12020 Doge). Also, limited-edition items such as the 'Cyberwhistle' (300 Doge), which is designed as a look-alike of the long-awaited Cybertruck, are now listed in the lifestyle section of the official website.

After the tweet went viral, Dogecoin shot up to $0.20, with a 14.48% rise in the last 24 hours. Dogecoin currently ranks number 11, with a market cap of $26 Billion. Currently trading at $0.19, but the crypto peaked its all-time high at 0.73 USD a piece back in the year. Software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer invented it. It is used mainly as a tipping system on Reddit and Twitter to reward the creation or sharing of quality content.

Musk previously posted many tweets on social media that Dogecoin is his favorite coin. However, earlier, Musk also vouched for BTC but currently supports dog meme coin calling himself "Dogefather." No doubt Musk assured Tesla is "most likely" going to resume accepting Bitcoin payment in the future, but only after he is confident about improvements in the energy mix used to mine the cryptocurrency.

Musk said, "I wanted a little bit more due diligence to confirm that the percentage of renewable energy usage is most likely at or above 50 percent and that there is a trend toward increasing that number, and if so Tesla would resume accepting bitcoin."

The billionaire accepted he has a substantial individual investment in BTC along with his company's investment. He owns considerably fewer Ethereum and Dogecoin holdings.