Elon Musk pushes Dogecoin’s price down; crypto declines to 50 Cents after Tesla chief explains what it is

For those still perplexed with what exactly the meme cryptocurrency Dogecoin is, Tesla’s Elon Musk himself made a good attempt to explain it on the American late-night comedy sketch show Saturday Night Live’s (SNL) satirical news programme Weekend Update. Musk defined Dogecoin’s nature and its significance in the financial world in more ways than one would generally think of to the programme hosts Michael Che and Colin Jost who repeatedly pressed the billionaire entrepreneur to answer “what is Dogecoin?”

However, Dogecoin’s price declined nearly 22 per cent during the early US hours on Sunday after Musk, the self-proclaimed ‘Dogefather’, replied that it is a ‘hustle’ during the show. Dogecoin dropped from 64 Cents at the beginning of the SNL at 11.30 pm EDT Saturday (3.30 am GMT Sunday) to 50 Cents at 6 am EDT Sunday, as per data from Coindesk.

“It started as a joke based on an internet meme but now it has taken off in a very real way,” Musk replied once to Che at the beginning of the show. “It was created in 2013 and has a circulating supply of 117 billion coins, of which 113 billion have already been mined,” he replied again as the audience laughed at Che’s same question again: “So, what is Dogecoin.” “It’s the future of currency. It’s an unstoppable financial vehicle that’s going to take over the world,” Musk added.

Also read: Elon Musk sounds caution on cryptocurrency: ‘Don’t risk life savings, invest with caution’

“I get that, but was is it man?” said Che. “I keep telling you, it’s the cryptocurrency you can trade for conventional money,” Musk smiled. When Che countered,” So, it’s a hustle?” Musk responded, “Yeah, it’s a hustle,” and laughed. Musk was introduced as a ‘financial expert’ named Lloyd Ostertag in the show.

On Friday, Musk urged investors looking to invest in cryptos to refrain from putting their life savings into it. “First of all, I think people should not invest their life savings in cryptocurrency. To be clear, I think that’s unwise,” he said in a video released by TMZ. “Cryptocurrency is promising, but please invest with caution,” Musk had tweeted on Friday with the link of the TMZ video on Twitter. Named after a meme of the Japanese dog breed Shiba Inu and started as a satirical alternative to Bitcoin’s craze, Dogecoin is already the fourth-largest cryptocurrency as per CoinMarketCap. It was trading at 52 Cents with a market cap of $67 billion, at the time of filing this report. The coin had earlier peaked at $0.41 on April 20 this year before sliding to $0.23 on April 24.