Elon Musk’s SpaceX Is Set Accept Dogecoin To Launch A Satellite To The Moon
Elon Musk’s SpaceX Is Set Accept Dogecoin To Launch A Satellite To The Moon. Elon Musk’s SpaceX has accepted the meme-inspired crypto currency Dogecoin as payment to launch a satellite to the moon next year. Musk announced that his rocket company will now accept Dogecoin as payment in a tweet Sunday night calling it the first crypto and first meme in space. He added that SpaceX will launch the “DOGE-1 Mission to the Moon” in the first quarter of 2022.
The Geometric Energy Corporation, which is funding the mission, called it the first-ever commercial lunar payload in history paid for entirely with Dogecoin, which was started as a joke. It plans to launch an 88-pound satellite on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. GEC told Yahoo News that its payload “will obtain lunar-spatial intelligence from sensors and cameras on-board with integrated communications and computational systems.”
“Having officially transacted with DOGE for a deal of this magnitude, Geometric Energy Corporation and SpaceX have solidified DOGE as a unit of account for lunar business in the space sector,” GEC’s CEO Samuel Reid said in a statement.
Dogecoin has soared by more than 800% over the last month, with its total market value rising above $70 billion, according to crypto currency data tracker Coin Gecko but the price has fallen since Saturday night, when Musk described the currency as a “hustle” when he was hosting “Saturday Night Live.”
Dogecoin is a crypto currency created by software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer, who decided to create a payment system as a joke, making fun of the wild speculation in crypto currencies at the time. Dogecoin features the face of the Shiba Inu dog from the “Doge” meme as its logo and namesake. It was introduced on December 6, 2013, and quickly developed its own online community, reaching a market capitalisation of US$85,314,347,523 on May 5, 2021.
Palmer is credited with making the idea a reality. At the time, he was a member of the Adobe Systems marketing department in Sydney. Palmer had purchased the domain Dogecoin.com and added a splash screen, which featured the coin’s logo and scattered Comic Sans text. Markus reached out to Palmer after seeing the site, and started efforts to develop the currency. Markus had designed Dogecoin’s protocol based on existing crypto currencies Luckycoin and Litecoin, which uses scrypt technology in their proof-of-work algorithm.
