DOGE surges 25% after Tesla accepts DOGE payments for merchandise

On January 14, Dogecoin’s (DOGE) value soared when “Dogefather” Elon Musk revealed that Tesla would begin accepting it as payment for merchandise.

DOGE price rose roughly 13% after the announcement, reaching a 30-day high of $0.2150. Its upward movement was part of a bigger intraday rise that was already underway before Musk’s Dogecoin tweet got viral. The price of the meme coin increased by more than 25% before correcting lower to $0.1986 due to profit-taking.

Tesla merch buyable with Dogecoin

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 14, 2022

Is DOGE better than BTC?

Musk recently said that he still prefers Dogecoin over Bitcoin for daily transactions, which also surged the price of the coin.

The “better-than-Bitcoin” advantages of DOGE, primarily as a payment option due to its lower electricity consumption, were at the heart of Musk’s enthusiasm for the cryptocurrency. Musk stated in an interview with Time Magazine that “Bitcoin is not a good substitute for transactional currency. Even though it was created as a silly joke, Dogecoin is better suited for transactions.”

Tesla added the meme token’s payment option to its online purchasing portal roughly a month after Musk showed interest in accepting DOGE as a test payment.

Notably, Tesla before this reversed its decision of accepting Bitcoin as the payment method after announcing the acceptance news. As DOGE tested a multi-month resistance trendline for a topside breakthrough, the recent round of buying in the Dogecoin market slowed.

In more depth, the DOGE price rally slammed against a declining trendline barrier that has been stifling its gains since May 2021. The trendline played a role in dropping DOGE from its intraday high of $0.2150 to $0.1958 on Jan. 14.

Meanwhile, the Dogecoin’s 200-day exponential moving average (200-day EMA; the orange wave) helped curb its gains on Jan. 14, suggesting that DOGE price would pull back from its current uptrend in the next days.