“Mission to moon” – another marketing gimmick for Dogecoin?
SpaceX has announced a lunar mission in which all the transactional payments would be handled using Elon’s favorite cryptocurrency, Dogecoin.
Over the last few months, Elon Musk has been trying to push hard on Dogecoin by publicly projecting that he loves cryptocurrency and that he fully backs it. Why he would choose Dogecoin, a relatively unknown coin at that time and a crypto that still has not found any mainstream usage, is anybody’s guess.
His strong backing of Doge led to its price becoming 10X over the last couple of months and while it has helped certain gold diggers in becoming rich, it has also led to agony for a lot of traders with his high volatility during the same period.
The low cost of the coin makes it similar to a penny stock and this has made it easy for the price to be manipulated. And when one of the richest persons in the world sets his eye, it becomes an open playground for all but which is skewed to those who have a lot of money. In other words, it isn’t a level playing field anymore.
For all those regulators out there who keep pitching for setting up safe trading practices and platforms, it should come as a big blow that such kind of price manipulation happens but they still aren’t able to reign in such practices.
Over the last week itself, we have seen Dogecoin rising in price by close to 100% while it has fallen by 40% over the last couple of days. The price had risen in the hope of some positive support from Elon during his TV speech but the lack of it has led many to abandon the crypto and rush to the exits which have led to huge price volatility over the last few days. And to shore up the price again, the announcement of this lunar mission comes along.
The unabashed marketing of the crypto and its price volatility continues to pull in more and more traders who trade it in the hope of making a quick buck. This is why the regulators do want to regulate crypto in the long run so that such practices can be stopped and some sense of control can be returned to the industry.
If the crypto regulations are delayed, then it could lead to more and more inexperienced investors and traders being pulled into these crypto schemes and are likely to lose a lot of their hard-earned money and when that happens, it doesn’t help the investors/traders nor does it help the crypto industry as well as it desperately tries to seek acceptance and mainstream adoption.
It is important for the regulators and for the crypto community, as a whole, to step in and regulate the industry and create a level playing field for all and this would improve investor participation in the crypto industry as well.
Recently, we have seen the SEC Chief Gensler pitching for regulation of crypto exchanges and considering all these in the light of the dispute surrounding Ripple, it increasingly becomes clear that more regulation is the need of the hour for the industry and this would help to build more confidence into larger investors to start considering crypto as an alternate means of investment.
