Bitcoin rose sharply by 20% on Friday after Elon Musk added the hashtag #bitcoin to his Twitter bio.
The virtual currency climbed suddenly at around 3:30 a.m. ET, adding $5,000 in the space of an hour to trade at $37,299, according to data from industry site CoinDesk. At 8:00 a.m. ET, it extended gains to trade around $37,653.
Musk added #bitcoin to his Twitter bio on Friday morning. He also sent out a secret tweet, saying: “In retrospect, it was inevitable.”
It adds to the wild volatility in markets this week, as the stock prices of heavily-shorted companies like GameStop and AMC surged dramatically thanks to a rush of amateur investors inspired by the Reddit forum WallStreetBets.
Volatile Week
Another subreddit group, SatoshiStreetBets, led investors to pump the price of Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency promoted by the popular “doge” meme. Dogecoin had risen 800% in the last 24 hours at the same time.
Bitcoin price action was muted before Friday. The world’s most valuable digital currency hit $ 41,940 earlier this month before slumping a week later. It fell slightly below the $ 30,000 mark just last week.
The digital coin is still about 13% off its all-time high but up around 25% since the start of the year. Bitcoin more than quadrupled over the course of 2020, with crypto bulls citing increased institutional investment as a driving force of the rally.
Musk’s Tweets
It is not the first time that Musk’s Twitter practices have led to a rise in asset prices. The businessman recently helped expand the rally of GameStop stock prices in the after-hours this Tuesday, after tweeting “GameStonk” and linking to the WallStreetBets Reddit community.
Meanwhile, shares of Poland’s CD Projekt share rose to 12.6% on Thursday after Musk wrote on Twitter that he liked the company’s Cyberpunk 2077 game.
MicroStr Strategy hosted will be hosting an event next week entitled “Bitcoin for Corporations.” When asked by CNBC’s Morgan Brenner which companies will be joining the project, Saylor simply said that there would be “thousands of executives, executives and directors and advisers to organizations.”
Musk became the richest man in the world earlier this month, after a rise in Tesla shares helped his finances surpass that of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.
