Bitcoin soared 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 in an hour to trading at $ 37,299, according to data from the CoinDesk industrial site. At 5:17 am ET, it was trading 16% higher at around $ 36,423.
Musk added #bitcoin to his Twitter biography Friday morning. He also sent a cryptic tweet, saying, “In retrospect, it was inevitable.”
It adds to the wild volatility of the markets this week as the stock prices of very short companies like GameStop and AMC rose dramatically thanks to a wave of amateur investors inspired by the Reddit WallStreetBets forum.
Another subreddit group, SatoshiStreetBets, led investors to raise the price of Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency inspired by the popular “doge” meme. Dogecoin was up 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 recently helped expand the concentration of GameStop stock prices after Tuesday hours, after tweeting “GameStonk” and linking up with the WallStreetBets Reddit community.
Meanwhile, shares of Poland’s CD Projekt rose to 12.6% on Thursday after Musk tweeted that he liked the firm’s Cyberpunk 2077 game.
Musk’s addition of bitcoin to his Twitter profile comes after much speculation about whether Tesla’s CEO will buy bitcoin or add digital currency to his electric vehicle’s balance sheet.
The billionaire hit the headlines after a Twitter exchange with the CEO of software company MicroStrategy last month, following a tweet suggesting he was tempted to buy bitcoin. Along with Jack Dorsey Square’s fintech firm, MicroStrategy used its own balance sheet to buy bitcoins last year.
“If you want to get a $ 100 billion favor to your shareholders, convert the $ TSLA balance from USD to #BTC,” MicroStrategy chief Michael Saylor said at the time.
In response, Musk said, “Are such large transactions even possible?”
MicroStrategy will hold an event next week titled “Bitcoin for Business”. When CNBC’s Morgan Brenner asked him which companies they would attend, Saylor simply said there would be “thousands of executives, officials, directors and corporate advisers.”