New Delhi: Bitcoin surged on Monday to nearly $40,000, seeing its strongest performance since mid-June. The digital currency was up 11 per cent at 8:45 am on Monday as against the previous day and up 20.60 per cent since last week. It is currently priced at $38,099.39.
Not only Bitcoin, Ethereum has also seen a surge. Ethereum jumped 6.20 per cent to $2,304.72. Tether, on the other hand, slipped around 0.03 per cent.
The cryptocurrency climbed above its 50-day moving average over the weekend. Before that, it had dipped to below $30,000 last week. Strategists believed that this could lead to further drops.
However, Bitcoin got a boost when Elon Musk said at a conference on Wednesday that he wants Bitcoin to succeed and this space-exploration company SpaceX owns some. The ‘The B Word’ conference was also attended by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, and Ark Invest CEO Cathie Wood. Musk said that Tesla will most likely restart accepting Bitcoin as payment once it completes its due diligence on the environmental impact of the currency. “I wanted a little bit more due diligence to confirm that the percentage of renewable energy usage is most likely at or above 50 per cent, and that there is a trend towards increasing that number, and if so Tesla would resume accepting Bitcoin,” he said.
Meanwhile, Amazon also advertised a job vacancy for a digital currency product lead, giving rise to speculation that it might accept digital coins for payments. “You will leverage your domain expertise in Blockchain, Distributed Ledger, Central Bank Digital Currencies and Cryptocurrency to develop the case for the capabilities which should be developed, drive the overall vision and product strategy, and gain leadership buy-in and investment for new capabilities,” the listing said.
(Agencies)
