After Elon Musk’s response to criticisms to negate his market influence on cryptocurrencies and tweeting the possibility of Tesla resuming transactions with Bitcoin, the crypto has made a rebound to hit a 2-week peak clocking almost US$40,000.
Due to concerns over how mining Bitcoin gulps high energy usage which consequently affects climate change, Musk tweeted that Tesla may no longer accept Bitcoin in payment. This came after the car manufacturer, Tesla, announced a US1.5bn Bitcoin purchase in February which made the crypto to gyrate within the market.
Responding to Magda Wierzycka, head of cybersecurity firm Syngia, who accused Musk in a radio interview of ‘price manipulation’ last week, Musk tweeted, “This is inaccurate. Tesla only sold ~10% of holdings to confirm BTC could be liquidated easily without moving market.”
Tweeting on his official Twitter handle on Sunday, Musk said, “When there’s confirmation of reasonable (~50%) clean energy usage by miners with positive future trend, Tesla will resume allowing Bitcoin transactions.”
Reacting to this tweet, the cryptocurrency rallied more than 9% thereby surpassing its 20-day moving average climbing a bit further in Asia to clock at US$39,838.92.
Bobby Ong, co-founder of crypto analytics website CoinGecko, responding to Musk’s tweet, said, “The market had been going through another round of correction over the weekend … until Elon Musk’s tweet of accepting BTC again for Tesla purchases changed sentiment.”
Bobby also said the market was equally supported by software company and major bitcoin-backer MicroStrategy raising half a billion dollars to buy bitcoin.
Azuka Edokobi is a Writer , a Farmer, a Supply Chain Expert and an Entrepreneur
