Elon Musk’s cryptic Halloween tweet sends doge soaring

Elon Musk’s Halloween tweet featuring a Shiba Inu dog wearing a Twitter (TWTR) logo t-shirt has been interpreted as a signal of his intention to use the memecoin for payments on his newly acquired social media platform.

On Halloween night the Tesla (TSLA) boss took to Twitter (TWTR) and posted a picture of a pumpkin carved with the Twitter logo.

However, sitting beside the pumpkin was his Shiba Inu dog, wearing a t-shirt that also had the Twitter logo on it, and above the photo, Musk included a ‘winking’ emoji.

Check: Crypto live prices

The cryptic message caused the Twitter sphere to go into overdrive with speculation that dogecoin’s (DOGE-USD) incorporation as a payment currency on the social media platform was imminent.

In response to the tweet, influential bitcoin (BTC-USD) and crypto investor Lark Davis tweeted: “$doge coming to Twitter!”

One Twitter user, called MitchiMoney, responded to Davis’ tweeted and said: “I tell you what, anyone that has leveraged long better hope there’s a confirmation from Elon. Not just his dog. I’ll admit it’s curious considering his past with doge. Elon Musk can you confirm or deny if you’re using doge as payment integration with twitter?”

Dogecoin has soared over 140% over the past seven days in the build-up and of the Tesla CEO’s acquisition of Twitter.

The alpha memecoin stands at $0.143 as of the time of writing, up over 17% in the last 24 hours.

The recent dogecoin pump attributed to ‘the Elon effect’ has taken other memecoins along for the ride.

Shiba inu (SHIB-USD), listed as 13th in cryptocurrency market cap rankings, saw an impressive 30% rise in the past week, to now sit at $0.000013.

Musk finalised his purchase of Twitter on Friday, which was the deadline for the completion of the $44bn (£37.9bn) acquisition of the company.

In April, the Tesla CEO suggested that dogecoin could be used to make payments on Twitter.

Referring to subscription payments on the platform he stated there “maybe even an option to pay in doge“.

On Tuesday, the entire cryptocurrency market capitalisation stood at $1.07 Trillion, down 0.2% in the last 24 hours, according to Coingecko data.

Bitcoin made a bullish move up around 6% in the past week to $20,600, whilst ethereum (ETH-USD) also rose to around $1,600, up almost 20% in the past week.

Bitcoin has yet to become a store of value and hedge against traditional markets, it currently moves in correlation with equities such as the S&P 500 (^GSPC) and Nasdaq (^IXIC).