Elon Musk causes obscure crypto to suddenly surge in price after he names his new dog after it

An obscure, meme-inspired cryptocurrency has suddenly surged in price after Elon Musk shared a picture of his new dog.

Floki Inu coin hit an all-time high on Monday softly after the technology billionaire tweeted the image of the Shiba Inu puppy, alongside the caption “Floki has arrived”.

The 150 per cent price spike was mirrored across other alternative cryptocurrencies with similar names, including Floki Shiba and Super Floki.

Despite the massive price increases, all of them remain outside the list of the top 2,000 most valuable cryptocurrencies, according to CoinMarketCap’s price index.

It is not the first time a tweet from Mr Musk has caused crypto markets to move, having previously helped push dogecoin to new record heights earlier this year during his appearance on Saturday Night Live.

The world’s most famous meme-based currency was created in 2013 as a joke on the burgeoning cryptocurrency space pioneered by bitcoin.

It took inspiration from the Shiba Inu Doge meme and soon gained attention for its fun-loving and philanthropic community that sprung up around it.

As a self-proclaimed meme aficionado, Mr Musk also became interested in it and even bought some for his infant son X Æ A-Xii so that he could be “a toddler hodler”.

He has also quipped that the cryptocurrency could become the native currency of the internet, as well as potentially on Mars when a human colony is eventually established there.

“Occasionally I make jokes about dogecoin, but they are really just meant to be jokes,” he said during a Q&A session on the app Clubhouse earlier this year.

“But fate loves irony... The most entertaining outcome is often the most likely and arguably the most entertaining outcome, and most ironic outcome, would be that Dogecoin becomes the currency of Earth in the future.”

Mr Musk is currently the second-wealthiest person on the planet, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index, with a net worth of roughly $200 billion.

Beyond stock in SpaceX, Tesla and his other companies, the only thing he claims to own of any significant value is bitcoin, Ethereum (ether) and dogecoin.

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