World's Richest Person, Tesla's Elon Musk Sends Bitcoin Sign, BTC Rallies

Tesla mastermind Elon Musk has sent the crypto world into a fresh frenzy with his latest Twitter activity – adding bitcoin (BTC) to his profile, and making a comment that scores of dogecoin (DOGE) advocates have taken as a ringing approval of the token. But it seems it was about BTC. (Updated at 10:28 UTC with the latest price data, comments, Google trends data).

Following the news, BTC went up 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%.

At the same time, USD 694m BTC worth of short positions were liquidated, per bybt.com data. In the past 24 hours, 295,072 positions, worth USD 1.32bn were liquidated.

Also, the interest in "bitcoin" spiked following the news, per Google data.

At the time of writing, Musk’s profile on the social media platform reads simply “#bitcoin,” and features the bitcoin symbol emoji.

And a cryptic tweet that read, “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 obscurity to rocket into the top 10 tokens per market cap in what appears to be an unprecedented community-led pump for the meme-powered token.

Twitter-based DOGE users have flocked to Musk’s tweet in their droves, posting all-too-familiar meme images of the dogecoin pooch clad in astronaut gear, preparing for a journey “to the moon.”

But some Twitter commenters have claimed Musk’s tweet was actually a reference to his own bitcoin-related profile update – a factor that has quite probably helped the BTC price to skyrocket yet again.

Subtly pic.twitter.com/DL06MYmPA6

Musk, a famous Twitter trickster, has dropped hints about his interest in bitcoin and other tokens in the past, suggesting 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 Navada, the United States, reportedly has been fitted with a number of bitcoin ATMs, although Musk claimed that he did not think this was really the case.
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