In brief
- Last month, Elon Musk tweeted about Dogecoin.
- Now, an NFT investor wants to pay him $7,777 for a tokenized replica of that tweet.
- It's all made possible by a new service called Valuables.
Tesla founder Elon Musk is no stranger to posting silly things on Twitter. He’s used the platform to mock public safety precautions connected with the pandemic, and to inadvertently(?) depress the value of his own company’s stock.
He’s also tweeted from time to time about the niche cryptocurrency Dogecoin, which is based on the popular “doge” meme. His posts have significantly influenced the price of the coin.
Last month, he wrote, “One word: Doge.”
One word: Doge
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 20, 2020
Now, someone has offered to pay $7,777 for a tokenized replica of the tweet through a service called Valuables.
Valuables allows users to put up money for a tweet, which the tweeter can then accept if they so choose. The buyer then gets to “own” the tweet as an NFT, or non-fungible token.
Where fungible crypto assets like Bitcoin are all the same, in that each Bitcoin is worth just as much as every other Bitcoin, NFTs are one-of-one artifacts on the blockchain; they’re often used as hosting mechanisms for digital art and other collectibles.
Valuables describes these tokenized tweets as akin to “an autograph on a baseball card.”
The offer on this particular tweet comes from the NFT collector Tim Kang, who uses the alias @illestrater_.
“I offered $7,777 to Elon hoping he would take note and experience a simple example of what a smart contract can do,” Kang told Decrypt. “At least publicly, [Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey] and [Elon Musk] are not conveying that they understand the deeper implications of crypto... So it's my hope for our leaders to dive deeper into blockchain and be able to communicate what's in store for our future.”
Still no word from Elon—now the richest man in the world—on whether he’ll take the handout.