Marscoin is Mooning: It’s Up 1000% After Elon Musk Shoutout

Get ready for little green coins.

Elon Musk—tech don, internet troll, Grimes inamorato—may have mastered the art of the crypto pump: after tweeting about a  “MarsCoin” earlier today, the price of the real Marscoin has shot up over 1000%.

This tweet was part of a thread about Dogecoin, the “meme coin” that was developed as a joke in 2013, but has since become a semi-legitimate asset, thanks in large part to Musk’s advocacy. Changpeng Zhao, the head of the crypto exchange Binance, jumped in to suggest that if Musk were to launch a cryptocurrency, it ought to be called MarsCoin.

But it turns out there already is a Marscoin—$MARS, a project that was developed in 2014. And after trading beneath $0.20 for years, you could say the price is officially mooning: it rocketed to an all-time high of $2.50 earlier today, and settled back down to $1.02 around press time.

The team behind Marscoin shares a common goal with Musk: to fund the first human settlement on Mars. A brief explainer proposes that people mine Marscoin here on Earth, first, and then when the tech is developed, “a copy of the blockchain could be transferred to Mars.” 

There’s even a picture of Musk on the site, though the FAQ page reveals he isn’t actually affiliated with the project.

Musk tweeted something similar about Marscoin in December, but it didn’t appear to affect the price, which continued to hold steady at around $0.17. That was then, this is now, when Muskmania—like Bitcoin and Dogecoin—is hitting an all-time high.

If today’s Marscoin pump feels familiar, that’s because Musk does this all the time—spikes in the price of Bitcoin and Dogecoin have been linked to Musk’s tweets and memes.

Whether there’s a future for blockchain-based payments systems on Mars, Marscoin bagholders are already seeing significant returns here on Earth.