Twitter Changes Icon to DOGE, Price of Token Soars
- Twitter CEO Elon Musk changed the social media platform’s iconic blue bird logo with that of the famous meme cryptocurrency on Monday, causing a 25% surge in DOGE price.
- The icon change was made only a couple of days after Elon Musk tried to dismiss a $258 billion lawsuit that alleged he had used his social media presence to manipulate the price of DOGE.
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Social media giant Twitter changed its iconic blue bird logo on its homepage with the symbol of popular meme token Dogecoin (DOGE) on 3 April, causing its price to surge.
The icon change was made platform-wide, and is directly visible by the estimated 360 million monthly active users that visit the social media platform, which caused crypto Twitter to buzz with intrigue as to what Twitter CEO Elon Musk was thinking. The news caused a sharp rise in the price of DOGE, which before tha logo change was trading around $0.077 but is now exchanging hands at $0.10 according to Coingecko data. Musk’s first public comment after the change was a meme, as always:
While the reason behind the change is unknown, Musk had tried to dismiss a $258 billion lawsuit two days earlier, which was filed by investors alleging the CEO had used his social media presence to “operate and manipulate the Dogecoin Pyramid Scheme”. Musk’s lawyers argued in the dismissal request that “funny pictures” and “tweeting words of support” was not a good enough reason to file a fraud claim. The DOGE icon change can also be partially attributed to the administrator of the popular r/WallStreetBets subReddit, with Musk referring to older tweets that joked about changing the logo:
Musk is known for his frequent use of memes that include the DOGE image — which tends to drive the price of the token higher — and in 2021 the CEO even tweeted that “Dogecoin is the people’s crypto” and proclaimed himself the “Dogefather”. Back in January, the Financial Times reported that Twitter was designing a system to permit payments through its platform, and while Musk wanted it to be “first and foremost” for fiat currencies, he also sought the ability to add crypto such as DOGE.
- Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has regained his T-Mobile account, which on Saturday was compromised by hackers and used to take over his X account.
- On 9 September, hackers used a SIM-swap attack to take over Buterin’s X account, and siphon close to $700,000 in crypto by promoting a fake NFT giveaway.
Ethereum co-founder and Vitalik Buterin speaks during TechCrunch Disrupt. 18 September, 2017, San Francisco, California.Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch
- Although it was launched in beta on 10 August, the platform has already entered the list of top three fee generating crypto projects by earning $1.42 million in 24 hours.
- Friend.tech is a social app integrated with X (formerly Twitter) that allows users to sell and buy tokenized shares of their social network, gaining access to exclusive content and private chat rooms.
- The Twitter account of the crypto exchange was compromised for roughly 45 minutes on Monday, resulting in 22 transactions connected to the hack.
- KuCoin has calculated that the total asset losses were 22,638 USDT, and noted that it will fully reimburse users affected in the incident.