Bitcoin rose 20% on Friday after Elon Musk added the hashtag #bitcoin to his Twitter biography.
The virtual currency rose sharply around 3:30 a.m. ET, adding $ 5,000 an hour to trading at $ 37,299, according to data from the CoinDesk industry website. At 5:17 a.m. ET, trading 16% higher at approximately $ 36,423.
Musk added #bitcoin to his biography on Twitter on Friday morning. He also sent a cryptic tweet, saying, “In retrospect, it was inevitable.”
It adds to the wild volatility in the markets this week as the stock prices of companies with strong short circuits, such as GameStop and AMC, have risen dramatically due to a wave of amateur investors inspired by the Reddit WallStreetBets forum.
Another subredditing group, SatoshiStreetBets, has prompted investors to raise the price of Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency inspired by the popular “doge” meme. Dogecoin has grown by 800% in the last 24 hours at one point.
It’s not the first time Musk’s tweeting habits have led to a rise in the price of an asset. The entrepreneur most recently helped expand a GameStop stock price rally after Tuesday, after posting “GameStonk” on Twitter and connecting to the WallStreetBets Reddit community.
Meanwhile, shares of Polish CD CD Projekt rose to 12.6% on Thursday, after Musk posted on Twitter that he likes the company’s Cyberpunk 2077 game.
Musk’s addition of bitcoin to his Twitter profile comes after much speculation that the Tesla CEO will buy bitcoin or add cryptocurrency to his electric car’s balance sheet.
The billionaire made headlines after an exchange on Twitter with the CEO of the software company MicroStrategy last month, after a tweet suggesting that he was tempted to buy bitcoin. Together with Jack Dorsey Square’s fintech company, MicroStrategy used its own balance sheet to buy bitcoin last year.
“If you want to give shareholders a $ 100 billion favor, convert the TSLA balance sheet in USD from USD to # BTC,” MicroStrategy chief Michael Saylor said at the time.
In response, Musk said, “Are such large transactions even possible?”
MicroStrategy is hosting an event called “Bitcoin for Corporations” next week. When asked by Morgan Brenner of CNBC which companies would participate, Saylor simply said that there would be “thousands of directors, officers and directors and advisers to corporations.”