rewrite this title Dogecoin Barks Again After Fresh Elon Musk Speculation – Decrypt

Dogecoin is rising Friday, hitting its highest price in over a week as speculation over Elon Musk introducing payments to his X social media platform—formerly Twitter—arises again. 

The Tesla CEO and world’s richest man posted a screenshot of podcaster Joe Rogan’s profile early Friday. In the snap, a dollar sign appears next to the celebrity’s profile picture—leading to speculation that a new feature could soon be revealed. 

When one X user posted on Friday pointing out the mysterious new widget, which does not currently appear on the platform to users, Musk simply responded: “True.”

“My speculation is that ‘$’ button is used for sending money to someone as a part of X Payments,” wrote Nima Owji, whose bio describes him as an “independent app researcher.”

The price of Dogecoin is now up 4% in the past 24 hours and is now priced at $0.40, according to CoinGecko. The price briefly popped above $0.41 earlier, marking its highest price in more than a week.

Over the past week, it has shot up 87% after slowing down following a phenomenal rally off Musk’s comments and Bitcoin’s new all-time highs. 

In the space of 30 days, the coin—which is the seventh-biggest digital asset—has jumped in price by 189%. It hit a three-year peak of about $0.43 early last week.

Dogecoin was invented in 2013 by a group of engineers as a joking tribute to the “doge” meme of a Shiba Inu dog. The idea was to poke fun at the slew of altcoins entering the crypto space after Bitcoin had taken root.

But when tech entrepreneur CEO Elon Musk started pumping the coin on Twitter in 2020 by posting memes, it went up in value and gained a cult following.

It shot to an all-time high of $0.73 in 2021, but then dropped hard. It has started pumping again as Musk talks about how he likes the coin and as he prepares to take a new role in President-elect Donald Trump’s new government in an agency dubbed the Department of Governmental Efficiency (D.O.G.E.)

Musk—who bought Twitter in 2022 and changed its name to X—has enthusiastically spoken about users making payments on the platform.

Before buying Twitter, Musk teased potential plans to integrate Dogecoin for buying premium subscriptions, for example. However, documents showed earlier this year that while a payment feature was in the works, crypto wasn’t a part of the plans—at least not at first. 

Edited by Andrew Hayward