On Monday, Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, tweeted a link to the Dogecoin community forum on Reddit, along with a message telling prospective developers to submit their ideas there if they wanted to “help develop Doge.”
He said the developers of Dogecoin had gotten in touch with him to request some help.
Asked by a Twitter user why he prefers Dogecoin over other cryptocurrency tokens such as Ethereum 2.0 and Cardano, Musk replied: “Doge has dogs and memes, whereas the others do not.”
At the time of writing Dogecoin was up around 10 percent to $0.36, bringing the token’s market cap—the value of all Dogecoin in circulation—to around $46.8 billion. It is not clear if Musk’s tweets were responsible for the spike.
It follows the sharp price downturn of last week, when Dogecoin and virtually every other major cryptocurrency plummeted in value, possibly in part due to news of a crackdown in China.
Despite Tuesday morning’s recovery, Dogecoin is still down around 26 percent over the past seven days, in which time its price fell as low as $0.21 according to CoinMarketCap data. On May 8 the token hit its all-time high of $0.73.
Experts have previously warned Newsweek about the market volatility surrounding Dogecoin and other cryptocurrencies and the risks associated with investing in the technology.
Musk’s high-profile support of Dogecoin this year has made headlines as the token has jumped in value in recent months. Some observers say Musk has an ability to influence the cryptocurrency market.
Jason Deane, a Bitcoin analyst at Quantum Economics in London, previously told Newsweek that Musk “almost certainly” caused a drop in the price of Bitcoin earlier this month because of his “influence on the markets via the media.”
Musk announced that his electric car company Tesla would no longer accept Bitcoin as payment, citing concerns surrounding the environmental cost of producing Bitcoin in the first place. Bitcoin notoriously takes a lot of computing power to “mine.” Following this tweet, the price of Bitcoin plunged.
Some have even created cryptocurrency tokens in protest of Musk’s apparent influence on the market. The website of the StopElon token, for example, refers to Musk as “the biggest market manipulator of them all.”
Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, told CNN last week: “The fact that [Musk] is a 100-plus billionaire and he runs Tesla and SpaceX and all these things doesn’t change the fact that ultimately he’s a human—and humans get excited about dog coins.
“I don’t think that Elon has a kind of malevolent intent in any of this.”
