Tesla genius and self-made billionaire tycoon Elon Musk has hurled cryptoverse into a craze with his recent Twitter post. Elon attached Bitcoin (BTC) to his profile and remarking on dogecoin (DOGE) support have taken as a ringing approval of the token – it seems it was all about BTC. (Updated at 10:28 UTC with the latest price data, comments, Google trends data).
Just after the news, BTC increased more than 11% in less than an hour, later surging even more and hitting USD 37,851 before it corrected lower.
At 10:25 UTC, BTC is still up by 16% in a day and trades USD 36,119. It advanced by 17% in a week, increasing its monthly gains to 32%.
Simultaneously, USD 694m BTC worth of short positions were liquidated, per bybt.com data. In the past 24 hours, investors liquidated 295,072 positions worth USD 1.32bn.
The interest in “bitcoin” spiked following the news, per Google data.
Source: trends.google.com
Musk’s profile on the social media platform reads “#bitcoin,” and emphasizes the bitcoin symbol emoji at the time of reporting.
And a cryptic tweet that expressed, “In retrospect, it was inevitable,” appears to have been interpreted by many as a reference to the phenomenal recent performance of DOGE.
DOGE has come out of relative uncertainty to rocket into the top 10 tokens per market cap in what appears to be an unusual community-led pump for the meme-powered token.
Twitter-based DOGE users have flocked to Musk’s tweet in their droves, twitting all-too-familiar meme images of the dogecoin pooch clad in astronaut gear, planning for a journey “to the moon.”
But some Twitter critics have claimed Musk’s tweet was a reference to his bitcoin-related profile update – an element that has quite presumably helped the BTC price to skyrocket one more time.
Musk, a famous Twitter trickster, has released hints about his interest in bitcoin and other tokens in the past, hinting via a meme that he may be open to the idea of bitcoin buying as an investment strategy. Late last year, he sparked a Twitter storm by tweeting, “Bitcoin is my safe word” – later going on to say he was “just kidding.”
His firm’s Gigafactory 1 plant in Nevada, the United States, as claimed, has been fitted with several bitcoin ATMs, although Musk stated that he did not think this was the case.
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