Elon Musk Is Back With His Support For Dogecoin, Thinks It Should Be Listed On Coinbase

Elon Musk wants Dogecoin to be available on the crypto exchange, Coinbase, and shared his intentions towards owning a Shiba Inu, the breed of dog that's the face of meme coin, Doge.  

On the 12th of March, a Twitter user with handle @itsALLrisky tweeted at the billionaire, "Hi Elon, I saw a report that Coinbase was used to the Tesla BTC purchase (nice entry btw). Do you think Coinbase should enable dogecoin on their platform? It would enable many folks to easily access DOGE.", to which Elon Musk replied with an enthusiastic "Yes!" The tweet has however been taken down.

Dogecoin is currently not available on Coinbase, the popular crypto exchange which has gone public on Nasdaq and is trading for as high as $336 per share, with a current market capitalization of over $1 trillion.

Dogecoin, which started as a joke to other cryptos, has started to be recognized as a means of payment on some platforms. Bitpay, a crypto merchant service provider added it to its list of supported crypto. Coinflip, which is a major crypto ATM operator has also made Dogecoin available for purchase at all of its crypto ATM outlets around the United States.

Elon Musk dedicated some time to joke with followers on Twitter last Saturday in tweets which have however been taken down. After writing "Doge day afternoon", he further went on to tweet, "Ancient Romans sacrificed a dogecoin at the beginning of the Doge Days to appease the rage of Sirius, believing that the star was the cause of the hot, sultry, weather."

The 49-year-old has warned, however, that all of his tweets on dogecoin were purely banter and shouldn't be used as investment advice. In an interview on live-audio app Clubhouse, on the 1st of February, he said, "Occasionally, I make jokes about dogecoin but they are meant to be jokes. Dogecoin was made as a joke to make fun of cryptocurrencies. Obviously." That was the interview where he grilled Robinhood CEO over the GameStop saga when Reddit investors successfully pushed the price of GameStop shared high, to challenge Wallstreet short-sellers.

Elon Musk has been quite instrumental in Dogecoin's growth. In the months of January and February, he repeatedly tweeted about the coin, sending the price soaring each time. A tweet in February, captioned "Dogecoin is the people's crypto" took the price of the coin 75 percent higher.

 Another tweet showed the Dogecoin dog, wearing a spacesuit on the moon, captioned "literally." This sent the price of DOGE up by 29 percent.

On Friday, a tweet by Elon showing a dog barking at the moon sent DOGE to $0.42, over three times its value over the past 24 hours.

Dogecoin has seen tremendous growth this year, much more than any of its crypto counterparts, Bitcoin and Ethereum. The value of the coin has recorded growths of about 1163 percent in the time between 31st December 2020 and April 2021, much more than can be said for Bitcoin and Ethereum, which have both grown 104 percent and 193 percent respectively in the same period. One DOGE currently trades at $0.42, when it was only about $0.01 in January. It has a market capitalization of $52 billion.