Dogecoin Whale Activity Goes Up 148 Percent After Tesla's DOGE Announcement

Dogecoin has seen a significant rise in whale activity following news that electric carmaker Tesla would accept the cryptocurrency as payment for select merchandise. As per on-chain data, the original meme-based coin has seen an increase of 148 percent in "large transactions," which are transfers exceeding a value of $100,000 (roughly Rs. 76.11 lakh). The spike in whale activity comes at a time when Dogecoin's valuation on global exchanges went up by 40 percent on a single day on Tuesday, December 14.

As first reported by Benzinga, data from Into The Block shows that the increase in large transactions started surging shortly after the price of DOGE jumped based on Musk's announcement. The report also notes that market participants quickly shared positive sentiment on social media on the cryptocurrency, helping DOGE's social dominance across platforms move up 54 percent over a 24-hour period.

Elon Musk aka 'Dogefather' was known to have been in the process of integrating DOGE payments with Tesla car purchases under the pseudo name "SHIBA." The company had already begun accepting Bitcoin payments earlier in the year.

"Bitcoin is not a good substitute for transactional currency. Even though it was created as a silly joke, Dogecoin is better suited for transactions. The total transaction flow that you do with Dogecoin, like transactions per day, is much higher potential than Bitcoin," Musk said during an interview right after he was named Time Magazine's “Person of the Year”.

Dogecoin whales may also be moving funds based on a recent announcement made by a DOGE developer which revealed they managed to create the first non-fungible token (NFT) on the Dogecoin blockchain and posted the transaction in which he minted it.

The developer pointed out that on the Dogecoin blockchain, the cost to mint the NFT was only 0.01 DOGE. The developer described the minting process, saying he used SHA-256 hash functions to mint the NFT and store it on a Checksum.

Search interest for Dogecoin exploded during the cryptocurrency's massive 10,000 percent price rally earlier this year, going from an average of 135,000 monthly searches in April 2020 to 16.5 million in April 2021.

At the time of writing, Dogecoin's valuation has dipped and trading at $0.18 (roughly Rs. 14.44). The dog coin is down by 1.9 percent in the last 24 hours.