Every time Elon Musk does something on Twitter, the cryptocurrency market moves in response. Posting a tweet, changing his profile picture, or adding “#Bitcoin” to his bio affects the markets—the latter even more so, sending the price of Bitcoin (BTC) up 20%. Therefore, the community is waiting for what Musk’s investment in Twitter could mean for the cryptocurrency industry.
Recent files show that Tesla CEO Elon Musk bought a 9.2% stake in Twitter. This makes it the largest shareholder on the platform. The news instantly sent shares of Twitter up more than 22% in early trading and sent Dogecoin (DOGE) nearing its two-month highs.
Ken Li, chief investment officer at Binance Labs, told Cointelegraph that Musk’s investment may help drive the platform’s crypto initiatives and even lead to the integration of DOGE within the platform.
According to Li, “Elon Musk’s investment in Twitter could help increase the acceleration of Twitter’s adoption of crypto. It remains to be seen whether Twitter will start adopting Elon’s beloved Dogecoin in the future.” He also explained that:
“Elon has always been very vocal about the concept of a more decentralized and censorship-resistant social media platform, and this is something that blockchain and Web3 technology can help enable.”
Aside from Musk using this event to tweet a fun poll, there was no official announcement about the billionaire’s plans for the company. However, given both the Tesla CEO’s and the social media company’s history with crypto, one plausible hypothesis would be that the event will encourage Twitter’s exploration of more crypto and blockchain-based features.
Musk’s love-hate relationship with cryptocurrencies is no secret. In February 2021, documentation showed that Tesla purchased $1.5 billion worth of BTC. In March 2021, the celebrity entrepreneur started a frenzy when he announced Tesla’s plans to accept BTC as payment for Tesla cars. However, the market crashed a few months later after Musk revealed that the firm had abandoned the plan due to the alleged environmental impact of Bitcoin mining’s energy use.
Aside from BTC, Elon Musk has been affiliated with DOGE. Due to his fondness for memes, Musk’s tweets about DOGE have been linked to the rising price of the asset, leading to Musk being accused of price manipulation. The billionaire also stated later in 2021 that DOGE is better than BTC when it comes to payments. In January 2022, Tesla began accepting DOGE as payment for its merchandise.
Despite this, official records show that Musk’s electric vehicle manufacturing firm held $2 billion worth of BTC at the end of 2021. A portion of Tesla’s BTC holdings were also sold in March 2021 to test the liquidity of said volume. This created realized gains of at least $128 million.
Furthermore, Twitter has also been dabbling in blockchain-based technologies such as non-fungible tokens (NFTs). As early as January 2022, Twitter opened up support for NFT avatars to subscribers of Twitter Blue, a paid subscription service that costs $2.99 per month. However, Musk responded negatively to the feature.
Twitter is spending engineering resources on this bs while crypto scammers are throwing a spambot block party in every thread!?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 21, 2022
Is Twitter spending engineering resources on this crap while cryptocurrency scammers are throwing a spambot-blocking party on every thread?
Aside from this, Twitter also supports crypto tipping through its tipping jar feature. As early as September 2021, the platform enabled BTC tips, allowing users to use third-party apps to receive them. In February 2022, the platform added Ether (ETH) to its tip payment options.
Because of your tweet, the community can speculate that Musk will first push a fix for the problem of cryptocurrency scammers spamming Twitter threads. Bitcoin advocate Michael Saylor offered a suggestion to fix this problem:
Twitter can solve the problem of scammers & spambots if they allow real humans to post ~50,000 sats ($20) via Lightning⚡️& get verified w/an Orange Check. Then we can limit comments/DMs to verified accounts. Bad actors forfeit their security deposit & @Twitter monetize malice.
—Michael Saylor⚡️ (@saylor) January 21, 2022
Twitter can solve the problem of scammers and spambots by allowing real humans to send ~50,000 sats ($20) via Lightning and get verified with an Orange Check. So we can limit comments/DMs to verified accounts. Bad actors lose their security deposit and Twitter monetizes the malice.
“Crypto Twitter” is a term for a reason. With its fast flow and rich interaction options, what was once known as a “microblogging” platform became the center of debate in the cryptocurrency community. So it’s only natural that opinion leaders (with deep pockets) get some part of it.
Following the Musk purchase, Twitter now counts at least two cryptocurrency celebrities among its shareholders, including former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. There is almost no limit to the expansion of that list.
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