Elon Musk Manipulating Crypto Prices? | This Week in Crypto – Mar 1, 2021

Elon Musk manipulating the crypto markets, JP Morgan suggesting Bitcoin as a hedge and Coinbase trading Bitcoin itself? These stories and more, this week in crypto.

Guess what happened after Elon Musk tweeted that cryptocurrencies were “too high”? The prices abruptly dropped! During the week, the price of Bitcoin fell more than 20% and it looks like Musk’s company Tesla has also experienced a serious dip. Analysts argue that beyond Musk’s Tweet, the dip was inevitable due to the overly leveraged long market and the crash on Wall Street this week. By contrast, Musk has done wonders for Dogecoin: after tweeting a picture of the currency’s mascot, the price of DOGE shot up by more than 25 percent.

Square—the payment processing firm run by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey—has purchased an additional $170 million in bitcoin. This marks the second major BTC purchase for the company in the past six months, as Square initially bought about $50 million worth of the leading digital asset last October.

It appears crypto exchange Coinbase doesn’t just allow you to engage in transactions… It also dabbles in trading itself. It was revealed in documents filed for Coinbase’s new public listing that the company has about $316 million in digital assets to its name that it’s purchased and traded over the years.

JP Morgan has supported the narrative that investors should allocate 1% of their portfolio in BTC as a hedge. This was asserted by strategists of the investment bank as more and more people seem to add fuel to the merit that bitcoin could protect assets against the inflating fiat currencies.

A Dubai-based cryptocurrency investment fund that has more than $1 billion of assets under management thinks that the value of Polkadot and Cardano will be higher than that of BTC in the years to come. It has announced that it will sell $750 million of its Bitcoin to increase the company’s positions in Cardano’s ADA and Polkadot’s DOT tokens.

The tourism industry of Madrid, Spain has unveiled a new cryptocurrency that travelers can utilize to pay for hotel stays and other expenses during their trips to the country’s capital. The currency, known as the Helysia token was established by the Madrid City Council and currently is worth more than 2 euros.

The drop in bitcoin’s price this week is wreaking havoc on the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust. The shares of the company have fallen more than the slump bitcoin is experiencing. Investors have sold shares in the Grayscale Trust at such a rapid rate over recent days that the share price fell into the discount territory after it was trading at premiums above 15% for much of January.

That’s what’s happened this week in crypto. See you next week.

A special thanks to eToro for sponsoring this video.