Last Updated on 13/05/2021 by Khushi
image courtesy: Moneycontrol
In the early hours of Sunday in the United States, value of dogecoin plummeted following Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s reference to it as a “hustle” during an appearance on “Saturday Night Live.”
On the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, Dogecoin was trading at $0.47, down 28% from its previous high of $0.65 before the display. On Saturday at 11:30 p.m. EDT, the billionaire Tesla Inc CEO hosted the show (0330 GMT on Sunday).
Since his tweets earlier this year transformed the once-obscure digital currency into a speculator’s fantasy, cryptocurrency enthusiasts had been waiting for his response for days.
Musk was questioned, “What is dogecoin?” and to this his response was, “It is the currency of the future. It’s an unstoppable financial vehicle that’s going to take over the world.”
“So, it’s a hustle?”, asked Michael Che, to which Musk went on to answer, “Yeah, it’s a hustle.”
Musk is thrust back into the spotlight at a time when Tesla’s stock is losing momentum after a meteoric rise last year. The outspoken CEO has made several remarks on Twitter about cryptocurrencies and has chastised traditional money for having negative real interest rates. In February, he said, “Only a fool wouldn’t look elsewhere.”
In the same month, his enigmatic tweets “Doge” and “Dogecoin is the people’s crypto” sparked a rally in dogecoin, a satirical version of bitcoin and ethereum.
However, in the video, he also said that cryptocurrency has a “good chance” of being “the future currency of the Earth.”
Dogecoin has soared more than 800 percent in the last month, (reports by CoinGecko.com), and is at present the fourth-largest digital currency, with a market capitalization of $73 billion. It reached a new high of $0.73 on Thursday surpassing the more commonly used cryptocurrencies in terms of use.
Tesla announced in February that it had purchased $1.5 billion in bitcoin and would soon embrace it as a form of payment for its electric vehicles, marking a significant step toward mainstream adoption and sending bitcoin to a new high of nearly $62,000.
