Benzinga - Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Wednesday sent the memecoin world into a frenzy with a tweet showcasing his company's humanoid robot, Optimus.
What Happened: The tweet, featuring a video of the robot performing tasks, ignited a significant surge in the price of Optimus AI (CRYPTO: OPTI), a memecoin built around Musk's robot.
Optimus, which was trading at about 21 cents and a market cap of 21.8 million, surged to a market cap of about 28 million immediately after Musk's tweet.
Why It Matters: Blockchain entrepreneur Bruno Volcovinsky told Benzinga that people recognize the power of Musk's statements and as soon as he utters a word, it serves as a cue to invest in a related memecoin.
"Investors' logic in this scenario is to buy these coins as soon as possible, expecting that others will follow suit. This leads to significant price fluctuations within just a few minutes. The outcome: those who bought first stand to gain. Thus, the investors' strategy is to buy any coin referencing something mentioned by Musk, wait for the price to rise, and then quickly sell. This explains the euphoria and excitement around each word from Musk: it presents a new opportunity for quick money-making," he said.
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Crypto analyst Tiredwtf says Musk has become one of the most significant influencers for crypto regardless if that was his intention or not and that the early support for Dogecoin (CRYPTO: DOGE) and the explosion of price that came with Elon’s support has made him a target for project owners and crypto community members alike.
"Since Doge we have seen many Elon-inspired coins such as Dogelon. We even see developers front running his future pet Shiba (CRYPTO: SHIB) name, and launching Floki (CRYPTO: FLOKI) which reached billions of market cap," he said.
Optimus's price rise follows a familiar pattern of Musk's tweets influencing cryptocurrency prices.
In 2021, his pronouncements were credited with driving up the price of Dogecoin by over 8,000%.
Now, it appears his focus has shifted towards Artificial Intelligence (AI) tokens, with OPTI and potentially others like GROK experiencing similar pumps.
What's Next: Still, history Musk-induced rallies often prove fleeting.
After initial surges, Dogecoin often witnessed price corrections. The same happened to OPTI, which retraced its entire price pump and is trading around 20 cents at the time of writing.
Spotting narratives is not that easy, after all.
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Photo: Courtesy Tesla
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