Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, almost touched the $40,000 mark on Monday following Elon Musk’s hint at Tesla’s acceptance of it as payment for its vehicles once again.
On Monday morning (UTC), the crypto moved above $39,800 before eventually correcting lower. At 03.31 UTC, bitcoin traded at $38,952 and was up by 11% in a day and almost 9% in a week. In the process, it trimmed its monthly losses to less than 22%.
At press time, the digital asset is changing hands at $39,393 according to tracking from CoinGecko. Bitcoin ended up being the best performing cryptocurrency today, as other tokens included in the top 10 list could only muster 4%-8% climb.
Elon Musk’s positive note
While merely responding to an accusation of being a manipulator of bitcoin price for it to work for his advantage, Musk seemingly provided some fuel to the crypto’s rally.
On his Twitter account, the Tesla big boss said Tesla will resume supporting bitcoin payments “when there’s confirmation of reasonable (~50%) clean energy usage by miners with positive future trend.”
Cambridge University studies show about 75% of miners use some kind of renewable energy which accounts for less than 40% of the total energy used.
Another fuel source for bitcoin rally
Another factor that could help trigger and sustain a bullish run for bitcoin once again is its network’s major Taproot upgrade which was locked in this past weekend and set to be activated in November.
The upgrade is said to be the biggest one since SegWit back in 2017 and will expand Bitcoin’s smart contract and scripting capabilities along with better privacy measures.
It can also improve privacy on second-layer solutions like the Lightning Network by making channels appear like regular bitcoin transactions once integrated into the Lightning implementations.
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