Bitcoin jumps above US$38,000 as Musk adds it to Twitter profile

[LONDON] Bitcoin surged above US$38,000 after Tesla founder Elon Musk mentioned the cryptocurrency on his Twitter profile.

Mr Musk's page on Twitter simply said #bitcoin with no further explanation, but speculation that the world's richest man might be a Bitcoin investor was enough to set off a dramatic rally. Prices spiked as much as 15 per cent in a matter of minutes, the biggest intraday move in almost a year.

Bitcoin pared gains later in the London trading day. The cryptocurrency was up 11 per cent to US$37,088 as of 11.29 am local time, after jumping as high as US$38,089.

"Obviously this huge melt-up is due to Elon's tweet," said Antoni Trenchev, managing partner and co-founder of Nexo in London, which bills itself as the world's biggest crypto lender. Mr Musk's support for Bitcoin "creates a safe zone for some of the smaller companies and possibly everyone in the S&P 500 to allocate into Bitcoin," he said.

Mr Musk also tweeted an image of a "Dogue" magazine cover featuring a whippet in a red sweater - a play on the fashion magazine "Vogue." He also sent posts calling Cyberpunk a great video game and said, "In retrospect, it was inevitable." Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange by volume, briefly suspended withdrawals on Friday to address a large increase in requests.

"It's just all our systems are under stress," said chief executive officer Changpeng Zhao. "Our system couldn't generate new addresses fast enough to match new users coming in." Traders trying to read between the lines of Mr Musk's tweets interpreted his cryptic messages as support for Bitcoin and Dogecoin, a digital coin originally created as a joke. Dogecoin prices skyrocked higher on Friday, jumping about 300 per cent in the last 24 hours to US$0.04355, according to CoinMarketCap data.

It's not the first time Mr Musk has hinted at crypto assets. Earlier this month, he agreed with a post referencing being paid in Bitcoin, and when someone asked if he owned any Dogecoin, he replied, "No, but maybe one day." Cryptocurrency stocks also surged. Marathon Patent Group and Bit Digital were up more than 20 per cent in US pre-market trading.

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