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Dogecoin Proselytizer Elon Musk Sued Again For Price Manipulation

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Elon Musk, a proponent of Dogecoin and a tech billionaire, has been charged with insider trading in a proposed class action lawsuit by investors.

The filing claimed that Musk engaged in “publicity stunts” using Twitter, hiring online influencers, and appearing on NBC’s Saturday Night Live to trade advantageously at their cost using many Dogecoin wallets that he or Tesla controls.

Such actions cost investors billions of dollars, they alleged.

Investors also cited Musk’s decision to change Dogecoin’s look from Twitter’s blue bird emblem, where he allegedly sold $124 million DOGE in April after a 30% price hike, in a filing with a federal court in Manhattan.

A “deliberate course of carnival barking, market manipulation, and insider trading” enabled Musk to defraud investors and promote himself and his companies, the filing stated.

Alex Spiro, a lawyer for Musk and Tesla, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Elon Musk requested the dismissal of a $258 billion racketeering case on March 31, which accused him of operating a pyramid scheme to support the cryptocurrency Dogecoin.

Lawyers representing Musk and his electric car firm Tesla Inc termed the lawsuit by Doge investors a “fanciful work of fiction” over Musk’s “innocuous and often silly tweets” about the memecoin.

Dogecoin $258B Lawsuit Devoid Of Merit- Musk’s Lawyers

The attorneys argued that the investors’ explanations of how Musk intended to deceive anyone or the risks he concealed were insufficient and that his words about “Dogecoin Rulz” and “no highs, no lows, only Doge” were too ambiguous to serve as evidence of fraud.

“There is nothing unlawful about tweeting words of support for, or funny pictures about, a legitimate cryptocurrency that continues to hold a market cap of nearly $10 billion,” Musk’s lawyers said. “This court should put a stop to plaintiffs’ fantasy and dismiss the complaint.”

In a footnote, the attorneys denied the investors’ assertion that Dogecoin met the criteria for being a security.

Additionally, they blamed the world’s richest man for intentionally inflating Dogecoin’s price by more than 36,000% over the course of two years before allowing it to crash.

They submitted their latest accusations in a proposed third amended complaint, in a lawsuit that began last June.

Here’s Why Floki Inu Remains “Pup-ular” Among The Pack

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Floki Inu’s Binance US listing has drawn quite an attention as the popular meme-inspired token jumped by 40% recently. As of now, FLOKI is still trending on Twitter with 700K+ mentions, alongside crypto heavyweight Bitcoin, and its rival Bone.

A possible factor behind the hype could be Elon Musk’s interaction with it, even if they don’t seem directly correlated at times.

In February, the proponent of DOGE and cryptocurrency entrepreneur posted a mocking image of his dog wearing glasses and signing a contract to take over as CEO of Twitter.

Given that his Shiba Inu breed is named Floki, it is hardly surprising why the Floki Inu token, skyrocketed by over 40%.

But this wasn’t the first time Musk had raised the price of the meme coin. He previously dressed his dog like Santa Claus for Christmas 2021.

Additionally, Floki secured a number of prominent listings, such as BTCEX and Crypto.com, one of the most well-known and well-governed cryptocurrency exchanges in the world.

This listing introduces the project to Crypto.com’s vast user base of over 80 million.

In Feb, the team behind Shiba Inu’s rival Floki Inu published its brand new roadmap for the current year. The roadmap gave readers of the blog a sneak preview of its plans for guiding the Floki community through the various stages.

Floki Inu’s Roadmap For 2023

Divided into four phases, the first of which includes the activities that have already been performed, such as the opening of Floki’s online store and collaborations with the decentralized oracle platform Pyth Network and the cryptocurrency payments service Binance Pay.

The next stages are the upcoming release of a native staking program, revamping the FlokiFi protocol, and the launch of the Floki Debit Card.

The native Floki staking program’s “Phase 1” is currently being developed, according to the blog, and will shortly be introduced with a crucial DAO vote.

Phase 3 will see the release of FlokiFi’s second major product, currently codenamed “Project TL” on 4 chains.

The main utility product and metaverse game Valhalla will be released at the final stage. Additionally, the company revealed information on a “mystery project” that it says “will play a key role within the Floki ecosystem.”

The team added that the aforementioned phases are not constrained by set timetables or necessarily represent “quarters” “months” or any other unit of time.

Dogecoin Slid By 4% As SpaceX’s “Starship” Postpone Launch By 48 Hrs

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Dogecoin soared to over 16% in just five days amidst the crowd’s anticipation of SpaceX’s “Starship” launch. However, the token slipped by 4% in just an hour after the scheduled event got postponed.

The uncrewed flight was slated to lift off from Boca Chica in Texas at 08:20 local time [14:20 BST].

Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, reported in a tweet that a pressurant valve appeared to be frozen in the booster stage, delaying the launch of the “most powerful rocket ever built” that was intended to transport humans to Mars.

According to SpaceX, the team is ‘working towards the next possible opportunity’ to launch the rocket, even though the launch will be postponed by at least 48 hours.

For context, Starship is touted to be both bigger and more powerful than NASA’s own heavy rocket called the Space Launch System or SLS.

The ultimate goal is to establish bases on the Moon and Mars and put humans on the “path to being a multi-planet civilization,” Musk said.

Musk, a fervent supporter of Dogecoin, has frequently used his influence to drive up the token’s price. It is therefore no surprise why the DOGE community was pumped up for the launch.

Recently the Twitter CEO changed the platform’s blue bird logo to the icon for the meme token in an apparent late April Fool’s joke.

Dogecoin Price Soared To Over 30% On April Fools Day

The Twitter logo on the social network’s mobile and desktop homepages was replaced with a picture of a Shiba Inu dog, the mascot of the token. The dog was also featured on the website’s loading screen.

Following the unexpected changes, the price of Dogecoin jumped by over 30% and the level of DOGE mentions across various social media platforms spiked as well.

However, the 8th-ranked token lost roughly 11% of its value after the new Twitter logo was switched back to the original bird logo for reasons unknown.

Onchain data platforms also observed the “aggressive” buying of Dogecoins by small addresses, referred to by experts as “fish,” as the value of the token increased.

When it came to the big investors, Santiment noted that these whales might be Musk’s friends, including the CEO of Twitter, who benefited greatly from the rise.

The report however stated that this is “just speculation, of course, without knowing the identities of the owners of these addresses.”

XRP: Elon Musk’s Tweet Triggers Spate Of Jokes And Memes

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XRP community is amused, thanks to the cryptic tweet posted by tech mogul and Twitter CEO Elon Musk that consists of a single letter, X.

Although Musk has never mentioned XRP in the tweets nor confirmed exactly what he was referring to, this did not deter XRP fans to jump into the meme fest in the hopes of grabbing his attention.

Chiming in first was the popular XRP advocate @MackAttackXRP who responded to Musk’s tweets with the ticker symbol of the token.

Several others jokingly tweeted other letters of the English alphabet in response, while a few speculated that it could also mean the name of Musk’s child. The SpaceX CEO is renowned for naming his children with eccentric names such as X AE A-XII or Y.

However, some of his followers tweeted that the crypto multi-billionaire might have referred to his other venture called X Corp based in San Francisco – the same city where Twitter’s headquarter is.

The firm was recently cited in court documents, and reports claim it could take over Twitter.

In spite of this, Musk continues to be devoted only to the meme cryptocurrency Dogecoin, which he considers to be the currency of the people and more suitable for payments than Bitcoin. Musk previously offered his support to Ripple in its continuing legal struggle with the SEC.

At present, the Tesla chief holds BTC and ETH, besides DOGE.

Meanwhile, outspoken YouTuber and cryptocurrency enthusiast Ben Armstrong, commonly known by the handle BitBoy, came to Twitter recently to express his views on the possibilities of XRP overtaking its competitors.

XRP could be the top Altcoin

According to BitBoy’s tweet, XRP will probably end up being the best-performing alternative coin of the upcoming bull run as long as the token receives a favorable settlement and there is no further appeal,

Additionally, he asserted that restrictions on the sixth-ranked coin are no longer possible because the regulatory challenges that the cryptocurrency encountered may be coming to an end.

In my opinion, as long as XRP gets at least a favorable settlement and no appeal, this will be the number one performing major coin of the next bull run. The suppression is almost over.

This tweet generated a lot of discussion and interest from the cryptocurrency community.

Shiba Inu Fan Addresses Elon Musk-Shytoshi Kusama Rumors

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A Shiba Inu-focused account has refuted rumors of project lead Shytoshi Kusama being Elon Musk. Calling them “fake,” and “he is not Elon,” he expressed regret that nobody else has been clarifying this issue.

The rumors first surfaced when the Tesla CEO posted a cryptic symbol on Twitter on Feb 8, confusing his over 128 million followers.

Despite the fact that the tweet had only the letter “.” [dot] and had no other information, it caused quite a stir among the members, especially after it was discovered that Shiba Inu’s main developer Kusama also tweeted the same symbol on Twitter in December 2022.

While this may look like a mere coincidence, soon theories emerged that the two persons might be connected in some way or the other.

One such speculation doing the rounds is Musk being the pseudonymous Shytoshi Kusama.

To avoid stoking more rumors, it should be noted that the claims are unlikely to be true given the lack of information concerning Kusama’s real identity.

One of the top Shiba Inu developers and a co-founder of SHIB utilize the fictional name Shytoshi Kusama to hide their identities. This is comparable to the case of the creators of Bitcoin, who employed the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto to conceal their true identities.

These speculations, even though existed on Crypto Twitter for a long time, have gathered more steam after the recent confirmation of the launch of Shibarium beta.

Apart from this, the Twitter user SHIBARMY CANADA [Dezaxe] also began to clarify claims related to the PAW project.

Shiba Inu: Paw Is Not A Part Of Shibarium

According to him, it is not a part of Shibarium and has never claimed to be, but it wants to support the Layer 2 solution and build on Shibarium.

That said, the SHIB army is elated over the actions of not one but two high-profile wallet providers ahead of the beta launch of Shibarium, the layer 2 network of Shiba Inu.

As reported by TronWeekly, MetaMask has recently integrated a new feature with gaming giant Unity to boost the web3 gaming sector. Even Kusama himself has retweeted the post.

And another one is Exodus, one of the oldest non-custodial crypto wallets announcing via Twitter that it has “logged” Shiba Inu’s upcoming layer 2 networks with its asset team.

Floki Inu’s Roadmap For 2023 Teases A “Mystery Project”

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The team behind Shiba Inu’s rival Floki Inu has published its brand new roadmap for the current year.

According to the blog, the roadmap outlines its goals for 2023 and provides a sneak peek at its strategies for guiding the Floki community through the various phases.

Divided into four phases, the first of which comprises the completed ones, such as the launch of Floki’s merchandise store, partnerships with decentralized oracle solution Pyth Network and cryptocurrency payments platform Binance Pay.

The next stages reveal the upcoming release of a native staking program, revamping the FlokiFi protocol, and the launch of the Floki Debit Card.

The native Floki staking program’s “Phase 1” is currently being developed, according to the blog, and will shortly be introduced with a crucial DAO vote.

Phase 3 will see the release of FlokiFi’s second major product, currently codenamed “Project TL” on 4 chains.

In the final phase, Valhalla, a flagship utility product and metaverse game will be rolled out. The team also spilled beans on a “mystery project” that it claims “will play a key role within the Floki ecosystem.”

“We won’t reveal too much about this project for now,” the blog added.

Furthermore, the team said that the above-mentioned phases do not necessarily stand for “quarters” or “months” and are not bound by specific timelines.

The roadmap places a strong emphasis on transparency and the project’s resolve to take on its much bigger rival Shiba Inu.

That said, the token had a stellar debut in 2023.

Floki Inu Price Rallied By 100%

The price of Floki increased by roughly 100% in January after the coin’s developer, the Floki Inu DAO, approved a governance resolution to burn $100 million worth of tokens.

Burning tokens serve the objective of reducing supply, which raises the value of each token while maintaining the same amount of demand.

Last week, the dog-themed token soared by a whopping 40% after Twitter CEO Elon Musk posted a meme with his dog Floki posing as the new Twitter CEO.

Additionally, FLOKI also gained entries into several leading crypto exchanges. Its first listing was on a Turkish exchange, Bitexen.

Recently, Singapore-based top derivatives crypto platform Phemex also added three new USDT-margined linear contract trading pairs to its platform including FLOKI.

The burning of 5.1 trillion tokens in two transactions by Floki Inu on February 9th also garnered media attention.

Floki Inu has also been included in the Metaverse, Gaming, and PlayToEarn categories on CoinMarketCap, one of the top cryptocurrency tracking websites in the world.

Dogecoin And Other Canine Cryptos Soar High After This Tweet

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This isn’t the first time Dogecoin (DOGE) has risen in response to a tweet about Elon Musk. Following Twitter CEO Elon Musk’s post of a meme featuring his dog Floki acting as the new Twitter CEO, traders are pushing all things Shiba Inu.

According to statistics, the price of DOGE has increased 5.4% over the last day.

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When Musk’s takeover of Twitter came to an end on October 27, Agrawal was replaced as the company’s CEO. Although the two were friendly when they initially met, as 2022 drew on, their relationship reportedly deteriorated as Musk became Twitter’s largest shareholder. Agrawal no longer follows Musk on Twitter, but the former CEO does.

After losing an online poll on the subject, Musk was said to have started seeking for a new CEO of Twitter in December.

He said,

“I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job! After that, I will just run the software & servers teams.”

CoinGecko data shows that Floki, which gets its name from Musk’s dog, has increased 41% during the past day.

After the Floki Inu DAO, the organization that created the coin, passed a governance resolution to carry out a $100 million token burn, the price of Floki increased by approximately 100% in January.

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Burning tokens makes sense since it reduces supply, which, assuming demand stays the same, increases the value of each token. This resembles a stock buy-back in the cryptocurrency space.

Dogecoin To Show World Canine Power?

This isn’t the first time Dogecoin has risen in response to a tweet about Elon Musk. Dogecoin skyrocketed in late January following a Financial Times report claiming that Twitter is developing a method to allow cryptocurrency payments.

Shiba Inu (SHIB), another meme coin, and other disproportionate increases have traditionally been the first indication of a market selloff, according to a report published in December 2022 by blockchain analytics company Santiment.

Markets have started to emerge from the depths of the FTX-caused crypto winter during the past three months. By the middle of January, according to reports, Bitcoin has completely reversed the loss caused by the FTX. With several of these coins showing double- or triple-digit gains, the market rebound has also signaled the start of an altcoin season.

In the past three months, Bitcoin has increased by 34%, while SHIB is up 40%, BONK is up astoundingly, 533%, and Floki is up 242%.

The fact that Dogecoin is down 2% during this time, despite the other canine coins screaming at the moon (including today’s rise), suggests that assuming Santiment’s theory is correct, we have not yet reached the stage of a market-wide sell-off.

Here’s how Ripple CTO Congratulated Elon Musk Over His Victory

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The chief technology officer of the massive Ripple Labs, who has recently been highly active on Twitter, not just on cryptocurrency subjects, issued a tweet that appears to be a congratulations to Elon Musk. The jury in the case brought by the SEC against Musk in 2018 as a result of his “420” Tesla tweet found the tech tycoon not guilty. However, the Ripple CTO’s tweet focuses on XRP rather than Tesla. Schwartz cautions that this tweet is a prank just in case.

Elon Musk received a significant victory after a jury dismissed investor charges that he broke the law when he tweeted in 2018 about possibly taking Tesla Inc. private.

After about two hours of discussion, the nine-person jury reached a decision on Friday afternoon, concluding that the investors who had filed the class-action lawsuit had failed to establish their claims against Mr. Musk or the electric vehicle firm he leads.

Mr. Musk, who had earlier attended court to hear the parties’ closing arguments, was not there when the decision was announced. Later, he tweeted his gratitude for the jury’s unanimous verdict and said,

“Thank goodness, the wisdom of the people has prevailed!”

The issue is related to the Tesla CEO’s tweets from more than four years ago that suggested selling the business.

Before this case got to trial, U.S. District Judge Edward Chen had previously determined that certain of Mr. Musk’s claims about possibly taking the business private were untrue and that the CEO had acted recklessly in making them.

Among other things, jurors were required to evaluate whether Mr. Musk’s tweets were relevant to investors and whether the misrepresentations resulted in damages for investors.

The jury’s foreperson, Robin Cadogan, declared that he wasn’t persuaded by the claims that the tweets were relevant. After the verdict was read, it was reported that Cadogan told the attorneys,

“The overall message, it just didn’t land. There was nothing there to give me an ‘aha’ moment.”

Significant Victory To Ripple’s Ally Over SEC

Ripple’s David Schwartz tweeted his own satirical congratulations to Musk “At $420, I’m buying XRP private. funding arranged.”

It’s important to note that the American securities regulator has started to focus on both Elon Musk and Ripple. In December 2020, the government filed a lawsuit against the San Francisco-based fintech company, charging that it and its co-founder and CEO made billions of dollars selling unregistered securities like XRP to institutional investors.

Now that Elon Musk has been found not guilty in the SEC case, the cryptocurrency community anticipates that Ripple will triumph in court against the securities regulator this year as well.

Dogecoin: Elon Musk’s McDonald’s Offer On DOGE is Still 100% On

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Elon Musk, a proponent of Dogecoin, responded to a user’s question by tweeting that his earlier promise to eat at McDonald’s is still valid.

It needs to mention that on Jan 2022, Tesla CEO posted a challenge for the fast food giant, saying he would eat a Happy Meal live on TV if McDonald’s accepted Dogecoin as a means of payment.

The leading restaurant chain did not yield to any requests in accepting the token.

To add more salt to the injury, McDonald even trolled the tech billionaire on past occasions, asking him to accept Grimacecoin, a made-up cryptocurrency, in exchange for enabling payments in meme cryptocurrency Dogecoin.

The fake token created after McDonald’s joke tweet also surged as much as 285,641% in a few hours as opportunistic actors jumped at the chance to cash in on the hype.

However, recently, the fast food chain threw a surprise tweet quoting, “What did I miss?” to which Binance’s Twitter account responded, “A lot of green candles.”

The Tesla CEO too chimed in by tweeting “Oh, hi, lol,” in the replies section.

This prompted “DogeDesigner” of UX/UI and graphic designer at Doge to inquire as to the status of Musk’s initial offer to McDonald’s regarding the acceptance of the meme token.

And true to his words, the multibillionaire replied with a “100” emoji.

Dogecoin Rallied By Over 35% In less than 20 Days

Musk’s tweet has been liked over 3000 times and has generated views close to 120k raising expectations that the fast food chain would eventually reassess its stance on the token.

The popular meme token recently hogged the limelight after a report published by Forex Suggest showed that DOGE’s carbon emissions have been reduced by 25%. With 1,423 tons of emissions released in 2021, the asset produced 1,063 tons in 2022.

The survey also credited Musk for being instrumental in refusing to accept Bitcoin as payment, due to its high emissions.

Owing to proactive efforts by the billionaire entrepreneur and the members of the Dogecoin ecosystem, Dogecoin saw a 25% decrease in its annual CO2 emissions.

Moreover, with regard to its price, DOGE kickstarted the new year with a surge of over 35% to date. At the time of writing this post, the 9th largest asset by market cap is trading at $0.08.

Dogecoin Co-founder And Elon Musk Take A Dig At SBF’s $700M Confiscation

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The friendship between the Dogecoin co-founder, Billy Markus, and the Tesla CEO, Elon Musk dates Back to a time that one can’t remember. Time and again they have showcased their bond on social media. However, this time it was no different.

Sam Bankman-Fried (widely known in the crypto space as SBF), the founder of the troubled FTX exchange, was reportedly the target of prosecutors from the DOJ, according to a recent TWJ report. The article cites a court filing from last Friday.

The Dogecoin co-founder tweeted the report along with a humorous comment in which he referenced SBF when the FTX founder claimed in court that he had just $100,000 left over from his billions. The money taken from SBF that was previously disclosed was primarily in the form of Robinhood shares.

Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and Twitter, responded to that with two ROFL emojis. When FTX and its founder SBF were accused of scamming investors and the exchange went bankrupt, both Musk and Markus were harshly critical of both parties.

SBF was accused of using substantial amounts of USD from FTX members to save his crypto trading company Alameda Research, however, he pleaded innocent to the accusations. In the fall of this year, he will stand trial for this.

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) announced the confiscation of Bankman-Fried’s assets earlier this year. The majority of them were held in the form of Robinhood shares (HOOD), but there were also monies in several banks and crypto deposits on the Binance cryptocurrency exchange.

Federal prosecutors from the DOJ, in particular, last week seized around $100 million from SBF’s accounts, which he kept in Silvergate Bank connected to FTX Digital Markets, an FTX company with headquarters in the Bahamas.

Dogecoin Fan, Musk Refused SBF’s $5B Offer

Sam Bankman-Fried contacted Elon Musk earlier last year to offer him a $5 billion investment to help him acquire the social media company, long before FTX’s problems became apparent to everyone in the market. He also assisted with the transition of Twitter to blockchain rails.

The Dogecoin (DOGE) supporter, Musk, rejected his offer with the money, explaining to him that putting Twitter on a blockchain was not possible. Musk purchased Twitter outright for a total of $44 billion; the agreement was signed in late October of last year.

At the time of writing, Dogecoin was priced at $0.08651 with a hike of 6.73% over the last 24 hours, as per Coin Market Cap (CMC).