The CEO of Tesla Inc, Elon Musk, reported today that a Tesla vehicle can already be purchased through Bitcoin and specified that this option will be available outside the United States by the end of this year.
“Now you can buy a Tesla with Bitcoin,” Musk said in a tweet.
“The bitcoin paid to Tesla will remain as Bitcoin, it will not become fiat currency,” he added on his social network account, where he has X million followers.
It should be remembered that last month Tesla revealed that it had bought 1.5 billion dollars in Bitcoins – apparently through the electronic platform Coinbase – and that it would soon accept it as a form of payment for cars, which generated that the price of the cryptocurrency world’s most popular will skyrocket. At the time, it was trading at $ 44,000.
“I know I have been a bit late to this movement, but I firmly believe in Bitcoin,” Elon Musk himself explained then in an interview.
Previously, Musk already gave clues about this movement by changing the description of his status on the social network Twitter, to include only the Bitcoin logo. Other large companies have shown their interest in Bitcoin and payment through virtual assets as part of their financial operations. In November PayPal opened its cryptocurrency platform to all consumers in the United States after a trial period restricted to certain investors. In addition, Musk also contributed to the soaring valuation of another virtual currency, Dogecoin, after starting to joke about it on Twitter, when he defined it as the “crypto of the people.”
The announcement indicates that Tesla has the option to place cash funds in “certain alternative reserve assets” including “digital assets, gold, gold funds that are traded in the markets and other specified assets in the future.” Today, Bitcoin rose 5% after Musk indicated that a Tesla car can be purchased using the world’s most popular cryptocurrency, which stood at $ 56,354 at 8:30 AM Argentine time. Technoking said in a message early Wednesday that the electric vehicle maker has added Bitcoin as a payment option. The option is currently available to customers in the US, but will be available in other countries later this year, Musk said. “Tesla uses only internal and open source software and operates directly with Bitcoin nodes,” he said. Nodes are computers that validate Bitcoin transactions. The tweet was posted after Twitter users became aware of the update to Bitcoin support for all Tesla car models through American online stores. Thus, “Elon”, “Tesla” and “#Bitcoin” quickly became trending hashtags on the social media platform. Bitcoin is up 90% year-to-date and more than 800% in the last 12 months. The details of the Bitcoin payment on Tesla’s website were directed to a web wallet address at BTC.com according to The Block. In turn, Tesla shares rose about 2% in pre-market trading on Wednesday.
