Twitter users were in for a weird surprise on Monday when they found the logo of Dogecoin appearing on top of the website. Instead of the regular Twitter logo of ‘Larry The Bird’, an image of a Shiba Inu dog was seen. The latter is the symbol of the cryptocurrency Dogecoin ‘meme’.
About
Two software engineers, Jackson Palmer, and Billy Markus, invented Dogecoin to rival Bitcoin in December 2013. The idea is based on the surprised-looking Shiba Inu dog meme. The founders aimed to bring forward a peer-to-peer digital currency that should have the potential to reach a broader demographic than Bitcoin.
Reason
Musk did not give any explanation for the logo change. However, some users are speculating it to be a delayed April Fool’s Day quip. And as luck would have it, Dogecoin price soared by 30% after the logo adorned Twitter’s website.
Lawsuit
Interestingly, the logo change came after a few days of Musk’s petitioning a court in the U.S.A. to dismiss a lawsuit filed by Dogecoin investors against him. The lawsuit was filed for $ 258 billion accusing Musk of running a pyramid scheme. This amount is triple the estimated decline of the market value of Dogecoin in the 13 months prior they filed the lawsuit.
Investors accused him of driving up the price of Dogecoin deliberately for more than two years by over 36000% and then letting it crash. This generated profits in billions of dollars at the expense of other investors. They argued Musk knew the lack of intrinsic value of the currency.
Investors also pointed to the fact that Musk portrayed a fictitious financial expert on the “Weekend Update” Segment of “Saturday Night Live” on NBC and termed Dogecoin “a hustle”.
Counter action
Musk’s and Tesla’s lawyers called the lawsuit a “fanciful work of fiction” over the CEO’s “innocuous and often silly tweets” about the cryptocurrency while filing in the Manhattan federal court.
