Dogecoin price surges after Elon Musk supports ‘important’ update

Cost of transacting cryptocurrency will drop 100-times if update is introduced

Dogecoin is back above $0.25 on 28 June following hopes of a major update (Reuters)

The price of dogecoin is on the rise once again after a proposed update to the way transactions take place on the cryptocurrency’s network received the approval of Elon Musk.

The Tesla boss said on Monday it was “important to support” the change, having previously called for dogecoin to become the currency of the internet.

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

“In the first six months of 2021, multiple new all-time high exchange rates against both USD and BTC have caused the recommended fee of 1 DOGE to become steep for the perceived value of transacting dogecoin on-chain,” the proposal states.

“Since inception, the goal of dogecoin has been to be accessible to everyone, but with current exchange rates, transacting DOGE is kept artificially higher than instated on bitcoin’s and litecoin’s chains, disregarding the fee economies.”

Dogecoin’s meteoric price rise this year means it has gone from being 10-times cheaper than transacting litecoin, to five-times more expensive.

The proposed changes would be gradually deployed over multiple software releases if they receive broad approval from the dogecoin community.

Software developer Billy Markus, who co-founded dogecoin back in 2013 alongside fellow developer Jackson Palmer, responded to Mr Musk’s tweet with the fire emoji.

Mr Markus recently announced that he had invested in dogecoin for the first time in eight years, following a major crash that took dogecoin’s value from above $0.70 to below $0.20 between May and June.

Dogecoin was back above $0.25 at the time of writing, having shot up by more than 10 per cent after the proposed update was first announced on Sunday.