SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has said any future economy on Mars could be cryptocurrency based.

The tech billionaire, who is one of the co-founders of online payments giant PayPal, hopes to send the first humans to Mars as early 2024, with the ultimate aim of setting up a “self-sustaining city on Mars as soon as possible”.

Responding to a Twitter thread started by AI researcher Lex Fridman, Mr Musk agreed a “Mars economy will run on crypto”, suggesting it could be with the novelty cryptocurrency dogecoin or the fringe cryptocurrency Marscoin.

The Marscoin project was founded in 2014 and saw a brief surge in popularity during the cryptocurrency market bull run in late 2017 but has since drifted into obscurity. The altcoin currently has a market cap of less than $100,000, according to CoinMarketCap.

See Also:

Bloomberg: Erdogan does what he can get away with – Analysis

Jean-Michel Jarre will welcome 2021 with an amazing show inside Notre Dame! (video)

Dogecoin could be a more likely candidate, given it continues to be relatively popular and shares many of the same decentralised attributes as bitcoin.

Last week, the price of dogecoin surged by more than a third after Mr Musk changed his Twitter bio to “Former CEO of Dogecoin” and tweeted: “One word: Doge.”

The SpaceX founder has frequently spoken of his ambition to travel to Mars in his lifetime and earlier this year ordered employees to accelerate the development of the next-generation Starship rocket.

Read more: Independent