Billionaire Elon Musk posted a meme on July 25 featuring two famous characters from the Matrix franchise - Neo, the protagonist played by Hollywood actor Keanu Reeves and Morpheus with the message ‘Dogecoin is money’. In the meme, Shiba-Inu headed Morpheus is saying ‘Dogecoin is money’ in response to Neo’s question if he can make a lot of money with Dogecoin.

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And finally pic.twitter.com/TcgwMSyjAy

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 25, 2021

Tesla CEO Musk’s latest tweet on the meme cryptocurrency helped its price surge marginally for a short duration. The price of Dogecoin increased by 20 cents per doge token on the crypto exchange Coinbase. However, the price soon fell below the psychological level reflecting the flat trades seen in cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin and Ether prices also increased during the same period.

This brief recovery came as a relief after cryptocurrencies lost $200 billion in value in the week of July 12-19 coinciding with a global melt-down.

Earlier in the same week, Musk had endorsed cryptocurrencies on a panel discussion organised by the “The B Word" conference and hosted by the Crypto Council for Innovation.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, one of the other panelists, also backed cryptocurrencies.

Musk confessed that he owned Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and Ethereum tokens as part of his portfolio. He added that his companies Tesla and SpaceX also held Bitcoin.

Pointing out that Bitcoin will find it difficult to become peer-to-peer cash in the near future, Musk advocated that Dogecoin and Ethereum could be combined to facilitate something that has higher max transaction rates and lower transaction costs. He added that as bandwidth rises over time, the latency would fall.

Musk called for an upgrade of the cryptocurrency, which came into being as a satire and a joke in 2013. US-based software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer created Dogecoin inspired by Shiba Inu (a dog breed) memes in 2013.

First Published:Jul 26, 2021 1:46 PM IST