As of now, no official confirmation from either Tesla or Musk has been made.
Earlier this year, Musk had asked his Twitter followers to vote for or against DOGE payments
Tesla might have been testing Dogecoin as a crypto payment option. An analysis of Tesla's source code showed the options to “Order in SHIBA” listed in between the existing choices — Order with Card and Order with Bitcoin. On Twitter, a user did some digging, and said that this could actually refer to Dogecoin, and not the Shiba Inu (SHIB) cryptocurrency. This makes sense as Musk has expressed his support for Dogecoin, and gently snubbed the Shiba Inu token. However, the latter has emerged as the 11th-biggest cryptocurrency by market value at the time.
As part of an eight-part thread, a Twitter user going by the handle @Tree_of_Alpha revealed that the “Order with Shiba” page works redirects into a “processing” page when DOGE payments are attempted, but not SHIB.
The tweets carried screenshots explaining that the SHIBA name mentioned on the Tesla page is actually Dogecoin.
It seems that Tesla is referring to the Dogecoin as “SHIBA”, probably a code-word inspired by the real dog face on the Dogecoin. The dog belongs to the Japanese breed of Shiba Inu
Musk's reaction or acknowledgement to the development remains awaited as of now.
In May this year, Musk had posted a Twitter poll asking people if Tesla should include DOGE as a mode of payment, to which, 78.2 percent responders had said a “yes”. There has been no substantial development on that front as yet though. The meme-based coin is presently trading at $0.2812 (roughly Rs. 20) per token, according to CoinMarketCap.
At a time the hype around DOGE and SHIB tokens is gathering momentum, US' whistleblower Edward Snowden recently advised meme coins investors to be “careful”.
“If you got talked into exchanging your hard-earned savings for some new dog money because a meme said you'd get rich, please carefully consider your odds,” Snowden wrote on Twitter – making the Dogecoin vs Shiba Inu face-off even spicier.
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