Key takeaways
- Elon Musk may be teasing interest in other cryptocurrencies apart from Dogecoin.
- His recent Twitter activities are fueling the speculations.
- Musk’s Bitcoin energy consumption concerns may put Ethereum and Cardano in his good books.
Elon Musk is known to be a vocal supporter of Dogecoin with his support for making the price of the meme coin mount in the past. However, observers have noted that he has recently not been too active in the Dogecoin community, especially with his last major Twitter reference about the crypto going as far back as July. At the time, he referred to Dogecoin as money, and not just a way to make money.
This is why speculations are arising that the billionaire CEO of electric car company Tesla may be broadening his support for the space to other altcoins as well. Fueling the speculations has been his recent Twitter activity.
In a recent exchange with the micro-blogging platform’s CEO Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk said “that’s my safe word too” in response to Dorsey’s post that simply said “crypto.”
Another instance was a recent picture he shared of his new Shiba Inu breed puppy named Floki. The tweet which has so far garnered over 300,000 likes from his over 59 million followers inadvertently had the effect of pumping the price of a Shiba Inu-themed meme coin – Shiba Inu Floki. The price of the token surged over 1000% to a new all-time high.
Musk was formerly and still claims to be a supporter of Bitcoin. The pioneer cryptocurrency was probably the first digital asset to catch his attention, but the relationship went sour with Musk citing the high energy consumption of the Bitcoin network as the reason for his change of heart. Musk, along with his company Tesla, denounced Bitcoin payments pending when the network can show evidence of using a substantial amount of environmentally friendly green energy.
This is why it may not be surprising if Musk throws his weight behind, or even adds to his company’s portfolio, an altcoin that is already energy efficient. Worthy of note in this category is Cardano’s ADA and probably Ethereum.
Musk has previously spoken of Ethereum when he revealed that it was his second-largest cryptocurrency holding. He stated that Ethereum had potential. However, he may still be concerned that the blockchain still uses a proof-of-work protocol.
However, Ethereum has plans to become more energy-efficient and scalable when they successfully migrate to being a proof-of-stake network with their ETH 2.0 upgrade. This may make the altcoin attractive to the billionaire.
This is also a key reason why Cardano comes to mind as the “third-generation blockchain” is already a fully proof-of-stake network and boasts of being several degrees of magnitude more energy-efficient than Ethereum and Bitcoin. Charles Hoskinson pointed this out in an interview with Forbes in April when he stated that Cardano was 1.6 million times more energy-efficient at the moment than Bitcoin.
