Dogecoin, the meme-based bitcoin rival that’s a favorite of Elon Musk, has surged this week as traders bet a Musk-owned Twitter
The dogecoin price has lost 80% since memecoin madness pushed its price to 75 cents last year but it’s rallied 30% over the last month, outperforming bitcoin, ethereum and other major cryptocurrencies. After buying just over 9% of Twitter earlier this month, Musk yesterday revealed he’s offered to buy the company for $54.20 a share, valuing the firm at $43 billion.
Now, as the dogecoin price begins to trade in tandem with Twitter stock, Musk, Vlad Tenev, the chief executive of trading app Robinhood, and FTX chief executive Sam Bankman-Fried have all weighed in on how dogecoin could help support a decentralized Twitter.
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Tesla and SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk could soon add Twitter to his long list of commitments. … [+]
“Dogecoin is now a proxy for Twitter’s stock and Elon’s acquisition,” trader Alex Krüger posted to Twitter, adding, “if the Twitter board says yes, the stock would rise 16%. If they say no, it would dump over 20%.”
On Thursday evening Musk admitted he is “not sure” his takeover bid for Twitter will be successful, speaking at the TED2022 conference in Vancouver, adding he has a “Plan B” if his bid for Twitter was rejected, without revealing the details.
Musk said he’d target crypto scams and bots if he does manage to take Twitter private.
“A top priority I would have is eliminating the spam and scam bots and the bot armies that are on Twitter,” Musk told TED curator Chris Anderson. “They make the product much worse. If I had a dogecoin for every crypto scam I saw, we’d have 100 billion dogecoin.” When asked if Musk had regrets over “sparking a storm of excitement over dogecoin and where it’s gone,” Musk replied that he still likes both dogs and memes.
Ahead of his appearance in Vancouver, Musk renewed his call for dogecoin to increase its block size block speed, arguing doge “should keep pace with the rest of the internet” in response to dogecoin co-creator Billy Markus who said he’d “picked one-minute blocks eight years ago because someone on Bitcointalk said 45 seconds on a different chain was causing lots of issues, and 60 seconds was the fastest without having too many issues.”
Musk and Markus were replying to a Twitter thread by Robinhood’s Vlad Tenev who had asked whether dogecoin could “truly be the future currency of the internet and the people?”
Last year, Musk proposed dogecoin increase its block time “10X, increases block size 10X and drops fee 100X,” which he claimed is “needed [for dogecoin] to become the currency of Earth”—and will mean it beats bitcoin “hands down.”
Meanwhile, Sam Bankman-Fried, the chief executive of bitcoin and crypto exchange FTX (who’s often known simply as SBF), argued that a decentralized Twitter could integrate cryptocurrency to improve its finances.
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The dogecoin price has surged 30% over the last month, leaving bitcoin, ethereum and other … [+]
“Would this be good for Twitter’s bottom line,” SBF asked. “I think so, given that they’re only net making around $300m per year right now, but who knows for sure.”
“Why not dogecoin,” SBF added. SBF thinks adding crypto and decentralizing Twitter would “democratize social media, make the finances transparent, and remove single point of failure moderation.”
Musk himself has already suggested Twitter Blue’s subscription fee could be payable in dogecoin.
“Elon’s interest in the space brings new attention to crypto involvement with social media—his love for crypto and dogecoin is well known—and this starts to validate Parler’s thesis that the future of social media is a combination of social and crypto,” George Farmer, the chief executive of Twitter rival Parler, self-styled as a “viewpoint-neutral” social network, said in emailed comments.
