Elon Musk’s name-dropping on Saturday Night Live did little to take the joke cryptocurrency to the moon, but his tweets about the dog-based crypto apparently sparked another surge in its price on Thursday. And that attention, it seems, has gotten lawmakers interested in regulating the wild fluctuations the market has seen in 2021.
As CNBC detailed, Musk’s series of Dogecoin-related tweets coincided with another price spike for the cryptocurrency, which was once worth fractions of pennies but has found actual value in the NFT and crypto bubble:
The price of dogecoin spiked on Thursday after Tesla CEO Elon Musk mentioned the coin on Twitter, adding another chapter to the volatile history of a cryptocurrency that started as a joke.
The price of the digital coin was up more than 11% to about 40 cents in midday trading, hours after the first Musk tweet.
That’s still not near the high-water mark the coin had in the leadup to his appearance on SNL, but Musk tweeting to his 54 million+ followers on Twitter seems to have a huge impact on its price. Especially when those tweets indicate that he’s not selling his shares of the crypto.
How much is that Doge in the window? pic.twitter.com/bxTkWOr50V
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 20, 2021
But amid that wild variation for the cryptocurrency, there are rumblings that the US government wants to get involved in regulating crypto like it does other markets. Another CNBC report on Thursday detailed the Treasury Department warning traders that any transaction worth $10,000 or more would need to be reported to the IRS.
“Cryptocurrency already poses a significant detection problem by facilitating illegal activity broadly including tax evasion,” the Treasury said in a release.
That’s just part of the government’s creeping interest in cryptocurrency markets. Protocol detailed that several different layers of government may want to help regulate cryptocurrency and the companies who are making big money buying, selling and mining various currencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum and, yes, even Dogecoin. While all of that could give people protections from the huge spikes of the boom and bust crypto market, it may also mean Musk’s tweets about the coin see increased scrutiny as things get more regulated. That’s something he is certainly familiar with at this point.