Elon Musk Shares Name of Pet Shiba Inu, Cryptocurrency Gets a Boost

It seems Tesla founder Elon Musk has moved one from his obsession with Dogecoin and found a new cryptocurrency to tweet about. Last weekend, the tech billionaire tweeted how he would be naming his Shiba Inu as Floki. Soon after the tweet that was posted at 4:33 pm IST on Friday, the Musk Effect worked its wonders, and prices of Shiba Inu coin witnessed a 16 percent rise when it reached $0.00000790 on CoinMarketCap at 4:53 pm IST, reported CNBC.

Musk has 57.5 million followers on the Twitter handle, and soon many of them invested in the new cryptocurrency. Shiba Inu coin could be considered a rival of Dogecoin considering how they both have a similar symbol of the Japanese breed dog. And if that was not enough, Shiba Inu coin also goes by the nickname “dogecoin killer.” The official website of Shiba Inu describes itself as an experiment in decentralised spontaneous community building, founded in August 2020.

The meme coin also came to the spotlight last month when Vitalik Buterin, the world’s youngest known crypto billionaire and founder of Ethereum, donated 50 trillion SHIB tokens, worth around $1.2 billion, to India’s Covid relief fund, founded by entrepreneur Sandeep Naliwal.

Commenting on Musk’s tweet, many users wondered what was the meaning behind Floki. Some guessed that the name meant the Marvel comic character Loki with an F. While others shared memes on how the tweet could prompt a crypto war among Dogecoin users and Shiba Inu coin investors.

Meanwhile, Musk continued to express his dislike for Bitcoins. The SpaceX founder bashed Bitcoin maximalists of those investors who believe Bitcoin to be the only cryptocurrency that would actually rule the decentralised currencies.

In his tweet, Musk asked how many Bitcoin maxis it takes to screw in a lightbulb. Replying to his own tweet, he wrote a sarcastic comment imitating the Bitcoin maxis.

Musk had also slammed Bitcoin for the harmful mining process that it undergoes releasing greenhouse gases in the environment. Due to this Tesla had stopped accepting payments made through Bitcoin last month, however, the decision was retracted later.

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