Key takeaways

• Tesla’s Elon Musk considers starting a university that will accept Dogecoin for tuition.
• While it seems to be a pet idea, it will not be surprising to see the CEO make it a reality. 
• Meme coins continue to surge on the back of Elon Musk’s Twitter engagement. 

CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Elon Musk has shown himself to be full of surprises and quite unusual for someone of his status. The billionaire finds time to constantly engage his over 61 million Twitter followers in conversation and swapping of memes.

A few days ago, he revealed that he was thinking of starting a new university that would be called the “Texas Institute of Technology & Science.” Today, he added that his favorite meme token, Dogecoin (DOGE), would be accepted solely for tuition fees in the institution, and dog owners would get a discount.

“Am thinking of starting new university: Texas Institute of Technology & Science — Tuition is in Dogecoin & u get a discount if u have a dog”

The engagement had a positive impact on the market performance of DOGE. Since he posted the most recent tweet, around $2 billion has been added to the market valuation of DOGE as it surged about 5% following his tweet.

The idea, which has now become a famous meme itself as the acronym for the institution was intentionally picked out as “T.I.T.S” as the billionaire himself has attested, while seemingly being a casual one may turn out to be more than that. It will not be surprising to see him take steps to make it a reality to promulgate the joke further.

Meanwhile, even as Musk continues to name-drop DOGE, other joke coins are benefiting from the attention being drawn to the casually created cryptocurrencies. The market has seen Dogecoin’s competitors continue to rise. In fact, Dogecoin has effectively lost its position as the leading dog-themed cryptocurrency to high-flying Shiba Inu (SHIB) which surpassed it in market cap recently.

It has been a tug of war between the two as DOGE initially recovered from SHIB flipping it, only to be flipped again. Currently, they stand almost toe-to-toe in market cap with around $2 billion separating them as SHIB’s market cap is about $39 billion while DOGE stands at about $36 billion according to data from Coinmarketcap.

Similarly, a host of other meme coins have also been showing shocking performances that have been attributed to Elon Musk’s Twitter activity. One notable among them is Dogelon Mars (ELON), a meme coin named after the eccentric billionaire, which has surged around 3,700% in October alone according to data from cryptocurrency exchange Poloniex. The move saw its market cap grow from around $26 million at the start of the month to as high as $1.19 billion by the month’s end.

Asides from Musk’s influence, it also appears that Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement of the rebranding of Facebook to ‘Meta’ has also had some ripple effect on the cryptocurrency market. According to ZyCrypto’s Newton, Zuckerberg’s move to focus on creating the “metaverse” may be behind the price surge seen in existing virtual reality and NFT platform Decentraland native token, MANA. MANA’s price increased 300% this week, bringing the platform’s market cap to over $5 billion.