Tesla appears to be testing a payment option for Dogecoin

Update (January 14): A day after the publication of this story, Elon Musk confirmed the DOGE payment option, tweeting: "Tesla merch buyable with Dogecoin."

Electric carmaker Tesla is testing a previously teased Dogecoin (DOGE) payment option, according to its website's source code.

The DOGE payment option was added for testing around three days ago, a software engineer who goes by "Tree of Alpha" on Twitter told The Block. The engineer analyzed Tesla's source code in the backend and said that the company is "definitely" testing that option.

"Most of the code is already present in the latest Javascript files Tesla uses for processing payments, but the part about Dogecoin is forced to return null no matter what happens, thus never showing (basically a way to test code in production)," said Tree of Alpha in a direct Twitter message.

In other words, the DOGE payment option is currently "a hidden feature" most non-technical people cannot see it by themselves yet.

Here's how the option showed for Tree of Alpha on Tesla's checkout page when they were testing it:

Source: Tree of Alpha

They have also found out that Tesla has added the "crypto_continue.html" page in its source code, meant to handle crypto payments.

This is not the first time Tree of Alpha has analyzed Tesla's source code. In November, they discovered that Tesla was testing payments for a coin called "SHIBA (SBA)," and that coin ended up being not SHIBA INU (SHIB) but DOGE.

The latest testing comes one month after Tesla Elon Musk said the company will accept DOGE payments for merchandise and "see how it goes."

Musk has been a longtime fan of DOGE. He has also invested in the meme-themed cryptocurrency, along with bitcoin and ether.

In March last year, Tesla started supporting bitcoin for car payments. But soon after, in May, it stopped accepting bitcoin for vehicle purchases due to concerns over the environmental impact.

"We are concerned about the rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining and transactions, especially coal, which has the worst emissions of any fuel," Tesla said at the time.

Still, the company currently owns 48,000 bitcoin on its balance sheet, worth over $2 billion at current prices, according to CoinGecko.

A request for comment sent to Tesla on Thursday was not returned by press time.