LONDON (UK) – The most popular cryptocurrency bitcoin registered a spurt of 14% on Friday reaching a two-week high after Tesla Inc’s Elon Musk tagged the cryptocurrency in his Twitter biography.
Musk wrote simply “#bitcoin” in his biography on the social media site. The world’s biggest cryptocurrency was up 10.2% at $36,901 as of 1005 GMT.
The billionaire entrepreneur, followed by 43.8 million users on Twitter, has a record of making market-moving comments on the site.
GameStop Corp, which has been at the centre of retail trading frenzy, surged 50% on Tuesday after Musk tweeted “Gamestonk!!”, along with a link to the Reddit Wallstreetbets stock trading discussion group. There, supporters affectionately refer to him as “Papa Musk.”
“Stonks” is a tongue-in-cheek term for stocks widely used on social media.
Bitcoin jumped over 300% last year, as bigger US investors and corporations sought exposure to the cryptocurrency. It touched an all-time high of $42,000 last month.
In December, Musk asked about the possibility of converting “large transactions” of Tesla’s balance sheet into bitcoin, in a Twitter exchange with a well-known advocate for the digital currency.
“That would be a very big deal,” said Christopher Bendiksen of digital asset manager CoinShares on Friday.
Traders also cited positive comments on bitcoin by hedge fund manager Ray Dalio as supporting sentiment.
