A growing number of business leaders and celebrities — e.g., Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey, Alex Ohanian and, most recently, Ricardo Salinas — have added the Bitcoin hashtag to their Twitter biographies. It hasn’t gone unnoticed. When Elon Musk added #Bitcoin to his bio in late January, Bitcoin soared by 20%. If indeed a succession of billionaires and tech moguls have taken the Bitcoin pledge — whatever that might entail — what is their motivation? Are they trying to manipulate the market, for instance — or promote their brand? Could they be just looking to pull the collective leg of crypto’s …

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has announced the creation of a blind Bitcoin (BTC) development trust worth 500 BTC ($23.7 million), along with rapper Jay-Z, for teams working on the project in India and Africa. Dorsey revealed the creation of the trust on Feb. 12 while sending out a call for three board members to oversee the blind trust initially. JAY-Z/@S_C_ and I are giving 500 BTC to a new endowment named ₿trust to fund #Bitcoin development, initially focused on teams in Africa & India. It‘ll be set up as a blind irrevocable trust, taking zero direction from us. We need …

Electric car manufacturer Tesla has seen more than $55 billion wiped from its market cap since announcing the purchase of $1.5 billion in Bitcoin four days ago — but Twitter and MasterCard have headed in the other direction. Since Tesla’s announcement on Monday, the electric car giant’s stock price has dropped 7% from $869.52 ($834.6 billion market cap). It is currently trading at $811.66 ($779 billion market cap). While there may be other factors behind the share price drop, some investors, such as Baker Avenue Wealth Management chief strategist King Lip, are concerned that holding 8% of the company's cash …

Legal advisors have warned that Tesla chief executive Elon Musk could come under scrutiny from the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission over his social media activity and public statements around Bitcoin. On Monday, Feb. 8 Tesla announced in an SEC filing that it had purchased $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin and will soon start accepting BTC payments. Shortly afterwards, prices of the asset skyrocketed to a new all-time high of a little over $48,000. Partner at Linklaters and former branch chief of the SEC's division of enforcement, Doug Davison, told the UK’s Telegraph newspaper: "It would not be surprising—given the …

Twitter may be the next major company to purchase Bitcoin, according to the tech firm's chief financial officer. In an interview on CNBC’s Squawk Box today, Ned Segal, who has served as the CFO of Twitter since 2017, responded to questions about how Twitter would react to Tesla’s recent $1.5 billion Bitcoin (BTC) investment this week. Segal said the tech firm was watching other companies closely, and discussed potentially adding the crypto asset to its own books or using it for Twitter employees' salaries. “We’ve done a lot of the upfront thinking to consider how we might pay employees should …

Social media activity for Bitcoin is at an all-time high following a massive endorsement from Tesla CEO, Elon Musk. Speaking to Cointelegraph, co-founder and CEO of crypto data provider The TIE, Joshua Frank, noted there have been 143,000 tweets over the last 24 hours from “non-bot accounts.” The new record beats out the previous high of 140,000 from Jan. 3, 2021. On Feb. 8, news that electric vehicle maker Tesla had added Bitcoin to its balance sheet sent prices and market sentiment to record highs. BTC prices hit an all-time high of $47,500 in early Asian trading on Feb. 9. …

Ricardo Salinas Pliego, chairman at conglomerate Grupo Salinas and Mexico’s third richest person, is plugging Bitcoin on social media. The billionaire with an estimated net worth of more than $13 billion as of January changed his Twitter bio over the weekend to include the Bitcoin (BTC) hashtag. Crypto Twitter users and some of Salinas' more than 840,000 followers reported noticing the change Saturday around the time the price of the crypto asset surged to more than $40,000 for the first time in 23 days. Welcome @RicardoBSalinas to the #bitcoin community. Let's join the #bitcoin movement! pic.twitter.com/an9wymsKE7 — Jay_OKEX_CEO (@JayHao8) February …

GameStop and Twitter are both a mirage and an iceberg — but don’t try tweeting that. Not because you won’t own the tweet (because you won’t), but because the only completely true expression that Twitter is capable of delivering as a platform is unlocking the ugly truth about the internet itself. Or as Elon Musk recently tweeted: In retrospect, it was inevitable — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 29, 2021 Let me explain. In the midst of Robinhood halting trading for its supposed users, Jack Dorsey has been talking about decentralizing Twitter and social media in general. But other than a …

Twitter founder and CEO Jack Dorsey has fired up his own Bitcoin (BTC) node. On Feb. 5, the tech billionaire posted a screenshot of the Bitcoin node software Bitcoind running on his computer, meaning Dorsey now lends a hand in validating Bitcoin transactions. Dorsey posted the screenshot along with the words, “Running #bitcoin”. The photo shows Dorsey’s computer in the midst of synchronizing with the Bitcoin blockchain, which requires that a user download the entire history of the chain to date. The Bitcoin blockchain is around 325GB in size at time of writing. Running #bitcoin pic.twitter.com/W51ga3yrKb — jack (@jack) February …

The effect of celebrity tweets on the cryptocurrency market has become a topic of study for researchers after a week in which Elon Musk triggered sizable price surges for both Bitcoin (BTC) and Dogecoin (DOGE). Blockchain Research Lab published a paper on Jan. 3 titled, How Elon Musk’s Twitter activity moves cryptocurrency markets. The paper looks at six occasions when Elon Musk tweeted about cryptocurrency and attempts to measure the resultant impact on the trading volume and spot price of the coins in question. “We investigate the impact of Elon Musk's Twitter messages on cryptocurrency markets. By applying event study …

Guggenheim CIO Scott Minerd’s apparent shift from bullish to bearish and back again on either side of an SEC filing pertaining to a half billion dollar investment in BTC has been raising eyebrows on social media. The observation was made after approximately $500 million in BTC was moved from Coinbase into a series of private wallets on Jan. 31, which corresponds with an amount and effective date in a SEC filing by Guggenheim Funds Trust. I looked in to the 14K $BTC transaction from earlier Split over 8 nicely mixed wallets, with some outputs going to a bunch of other …

Anyone who has been in the crypto space over the last few years will undoubtedly be familiar with Dogecoin (DOGE) and how social media activity drives its price action. A “fork of a fork” based on Litecoin (LTC), the coin has earned a unique reputation and a considerable cult status within the cryptocurrency space. Unlike other projects, Dogecoin has not seen any protocol upgrades or developments since 2015. Indeed, the success of DOGE derives more from the community-based efforts and the power of memes than from any tangible technical advancements. However, it would be incorrect to say the “coin” has …