Dogecoin price rises after Elon Musk supports transaction fees change

The cryptocurrency that was started as a joke is looking to make a massive move that would make it easier to spend.

The price of dogecoin has surged again after Elon Musk backed new moves to massively slash its transaction fees.

The mega-rich Tesla boss said it was “important to support” the plan after previously calling for dogecoin to become the crypto currency of the internet.

The proposal would reduce the average fee of a standard transaction by around 100 times.

But a word of warning – buying any cryptocurrency is a seriously risky business.

They’re highly volatile meaning your cash can go down as well as up in no time at all – and you must be prepared to lose all of your cash if things go wrong.

Make sure you’ve carried out thorough research and never invest in something you don’t understand.

Ross Nicoll, a dogecoin core contributor, shared a tweet related to the fee slashing drive and Musk replied it was “important to support”.

Dogecoin’s price jumped 8 per cent after Musk’s short comment on his Twitter feed – which has 57.6m followers.

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Elon Musk has backed moves to massively slash dogecoin transaction fees. Picture: Brendan Smialowski / AFP

The recommended lower limit for sending a doge transaction is currently one doge.

However, Patrick Lodder, the developer who created the ambitious proposal, wants to cut this amount to just 0.01 DOGE.

He said the changes “to reduce average fees 100x for standard transactions on the Dogecoin chain” will keep the “network healthy.”

In the wake of Musks’s tweet doge’s price subsequently rallied and is sitting at $US0.261 according to crypto data firm CoinMarketCap.

The proposal also won the support of dogecoin co-creator Billy Markus, who goes by the handle Shibetoshi Nakamoto on Twitter.

He reminded the crypto cash community that he set the fee model to “1 doge in 2013 after a spam attack” and that “it would be cool to see it get reduced eight years later!”

Dogecoin has seen wild price swings this year.

It initially surged in January, jumping by a staggering 972 per cent from $US0.007 (less than 1c) the day before.

That was off the back of a bunch of Reddit threads calling for it to hit a value of $US1 per coin.

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Dogecoin supporters want to see the digital coin reach a value of $US1. Picture: isSock

The target was an attempt to mirror a share surge in heavily shorted companies like GameStop.

On May 4, the coin reached its highest value yet of $US0.4854, after enjoying public backing from Musk on Twitter.

In April, the billionaire named himself the ‘Dogefather’ ahead of his appearance on SNL.

But the coin plunged from $US0.70 to $US0.47 after the show, and its value has since experienced ups and downs.

Dogecoin started as an internet parody more than seven years ago but has since become a legitimate digital currency.

Jackson Palmer, an Australian marketer, made a joke about combining cryptocurrency and the doge meme in 2013, but that joke has taken on a life of its own.

Dogecoin is simply a digital coin with a picture of dog on it.

That dog is the subject of an internet meme of a Shibe with an “inner monologue” featuring phrases like “so scare,” “much noble,” and “wow”.

This story originally appeared on the The Sun and is reproduced here with permission