Dogecoin barks again after new Elon Musk speculation

Dogecoin rose on Friday, hitting its highest price in over a week, as speculation about Elon Musk introducing payments to his X social media platform — formerly Twitter — resurfaced.

Tesla’s CEO and the world’s richest man posted a screenshot of podcaster Joe Rogan’s profile early Friday. In an instant, a dollar sign appears next to the celebrity’s profile picture – leading to speculation that a new feature could soon be revealed.

When an X user posted on Friday pointing out the mysterious new widget, which is currently not showing up on the platform for users, Musk simply replied, “True.”

“My speculation is that the ‘$’ button is used to send money to someone as part of X Payments,” wrote Nima Owji, whose bio describes him as an “independent app researcher.”

The price of Dogecoin has now increased 4% in the last 24 hours and is now priced at $0.40, according to to CoinGecko. The price briefly rose above $0.41 earlier, marking its highest price in more than a week.

Over the past week, it has surged 87% after slowing following a phenomenal rally from Musk’s comments and Bitcoin’s new highs.

In the space of 30 days, the coin – which is the seventh largest digital asset – has increased in price by 189%. It hit a three-year high at around $0.43 at the beginning of last week.

Dogecoin was invented in 2013 by a group of engineers as a fun homage to the “doge” meme of a Shiba Inu dog. The idea was to poke fun at the many altcoins that entered the crypto space after Bitcoin took root.

But when tech entrepreneur CEO Elon Musk started pumping the coin on Twitter in 2020 by posting memes, it soared in value and gained a cult following.

It shot to an all-time high of $0.73 in 2021, but then fell hard. It’s starting to pump again as Musk talks about how he likes the coin and as he prepares to take on a new role in President-elect Donald Trump’s new administration at an agency called the Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE)

Musk – who bought Twitter in 2022 and changed its name to X – has spoken enthusiastically about users making payments on the platform.

Before Musk bought Twitter, Musk teased potential plans to integrate Dogecoin to buy premium subscriptions, for example. However, documents showed earlier this year that while a payment feature was in the works, crypto wasn’t part of the plans — at least not initially.

Edited by Andrew Hayward