author: Angelika Kaldus
Dogecoin Drops; Elon Musk Will Re-launch It to the Moon
Elon Musk joked on Saturday Night Live that Dogecoin is a scam. The stock price plummeted. Now SpaceX will send a satellite to the moon and pay for it in Dogecoin.
- After Elon Musk's recent appearance on Saturday Night Live, Dogecoin valued dropped significanty;
- SpaceX and Geometric Energy Corporation are teaming up to send the DOGE-1 satellite to the Moon - the venture is to be funded with Dogecoin.
On May 8, Elon Musk appeared on Saturday Night Live (SNL), an American game show, and for the purposes of the skit, he played a financial expert. Lloyd "Dogefather" Ostertag answered questions about cryptocurrencies and tried to explain to the host what Dogecoin is. To make the audience laugh, the presenter pretended not to see the connection between cryptocurrency and real money, so he asked: "So it's a scam?". "Yes, it's a scam," Musk laughed, and Dogecoin's value went down like a rock.
Dogecoin is a cryptocurrency that was created in 2013 as a joke in response to Bitcoin. Despite its humorous origin (its logo features Doge, the famous shiba inu from memes), it survived in the market and began to gain popularity to the point that on May 5, its stock market capitalization exceeded 85 billion dollars - while in April, Robinhood, a well-known stock trading app based was overloaded when interest in Dogecoin suddenly surged.
Interestingly, on Saturday morning, Dogecoin was at its highest price ever at 73 cents, and at $0.69 at the start of the evening episode of SNL. After the show, however, it dropped to $0.41 (as of Sunday morning). All because of a humorous insert about Dogecoin being a scam.
It seems that Musk wanted to reverse the unfavorable situation, because already on Sunday Geometric Energy Corporation published a statement in which it announced that their satellite will fly to the moon aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and will use Dogecoin to fund the venture. The miniature artificial satellite is expected to weigh 40 kilograms, and its task will be to acquire information from sensors and cameras using integrated communication and computing systems. It is expected to reach the moon in the first quarter of 2022.
Such PR move makes sense insofar as it promotes the use of both Dogecoin and other cryptocurrencies in the space business, and besides, Musk is a real Dogecoin fan. At 09:00 today, the cryptocurrency was already worth 54 cents, so it's up 13 cents after the weekend drop. Perhaps the news about the DOGE-1 mission or the words of Samuel Reid, CEO of Geometric Energy Corporation, about the cryptocurrency contributed to this:
"By officially using DOGE for a transaction of such importance, Geometric Energy Corporation and SpaceX have solidified DOGE as the financial unit used in the lunar segment of space business."