Elon Musk alluded in a tweet that Starlink may accept the meme crypto Dogecoin for merch.
Starlink could accept DOGE
You may not be able to buy rockets with DOGE, but at least rocket merch may soon be attainable with Dogecoins. That is, if we are reading the tea leaves right and Elon Musk’s reaction to a request of whether his companies SpaceX and Starlink could accept Dogecoin – this could mean he really is considering such a thing.
Starlink plans to offer high-speed broadband internet to people in the most remote areas of the planet using satellite technology, while SpaceX’s mission is to ultimately put a man on the moon. If his third company, Tesla, is anything to go by, then the other two may indeed start accepting DOGE for merchandise items soon. Musk announced that Tesla would accept Dogecoin in its stores, sending the price of DOGE sharply (and briefly) higher.
What is it with Elon and Dogecoin?
Why Musk is so fascinated with the meme currency is unknown, but one thing’s for sure, that he definitely cannot let go of the Doge.
After he first started pumping the meme coin’s price last January – whether on purpose or not is the topic of much speculation – Musk never completely lost sight of DOGE. After setting an all-time high at the time of his Saturday Night Live appearance, Dogecoin has suffered a brutal correction and lost more than 75% of its value. Musk still tweets about it occasionally, but he does seem to have bigger fish to fry at the moment, possibly a sign of a cooling market that one person’s tweets cannot easily influence.
However, DOGE was not the only crypto that felt the power of Musk’s Twitter account. After Tesla famously started accepting Bitcoin for a while in 2021, the BTC price surged, and Musk became every crypto advocate’s darling. When the company eventually walked back its decision, Crypto Twitter had little love to spare for Elon Musk.
Why crypto prices are so easily influenced
Crypto is notoriously hard to value.
While you can make a legitimate case for something like Bitcoin having intrinsic value, it becomes much harder for Dogecoin or other meme coins. Pessimists are partially right when they say that much of crypto is a bubble because, let’s face it, Dogecoin having an eight-figure valuation is probably not reflective of its real value.
That is why crypto prices are so easily influenced, and the more obscure and illiquid the coin, the easier its price is to influence. Crypto Twitter is rife with stories and proof of influencers wielding their power to pump obscure coins and shamelessly sell them to their followers as the best thing since sliced bread, only to sell their own holdings at a profit. A good rule of thumb for valuing new coins is not only to look at its use case and other factors outlined in our article but to ask yourself: qui bono? The crypto space is full of sharks, and it’s best to keep away from them.
