Finance

Tesla Tries Dogecoin as Payment

Published

3 years ago

January 14, 2022

Tesla will be testing a new payment option for dogecoin, according to the source code for its website, The Block Crypto reported Thursday (Jan. 13)..

The DOGE payment option was added for testing a few days ago. A software engineer, going by “Tree of Alpha,” told The Block that the source code showed the company was “definitely” testing the option.

Tree of Alpha wrote that the code was “already present in the latest Javascript files Tesla uses for processing payments, but the part about dogecoin is forced to return null no matter what happens, thus never showing (basically a way to test code in production).”

That means the DOGE payment option is a kind of hidden feature that can’t be seen by most. Musk has said before that the company was planning to “see how it goes” with accepting DOGE payments.

Musk has not kept his affinity for crypto and DOGE a secret — he’s also invested in the meme-themed crypto, along with other cryptos like bitcoin and ether. Additionally, in March 2021, Tesla began supporting bitcoin for car payments, though it stopped doing so in May, just a few months after.

That was credited to the environmental impact of crypto, with Tesla saying it was “concerned about the rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for bitcoin mining and transactions, especially coal, which has the worst emissions of any fuel.”

PYMNTS wrote that the Dogecoin Foundation, formed as a way to achieve Musk’s goals of “putting the cryptocurrency on the moon,” wants people to take the meme-based coin more seriously.

The project now has a board and advisors, and a literal “Trailmap” which comes with a way forward to help redesign the site and eventually make a point-of-sale decentralized app to make it usable as a currency.

“The Manifesto was our attempt at capturing everything the community wanted from the dogecoin project: a ‘currency of the people, for the people and by the people’, something humanity could really use to buy a coffee or pay the rent,” the project said.