Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and the Boring Company, said today that Tesla will likely return to accepting the cryptocurrency Bitcoin as payment. The CEO moved to ban Bitcoin due to grievances over the impact it’s mining process has on the environment. The cryptocurrency has since moved to implement renewable energy sources in response.
Tesla only accepted the cryptocurrency for a brief period of time beginning in March. Only two months later, in May, Musk raised an issue with the digital currency’s detrimental energy resource use and announced it would no longer be accepted as payment by Tesla.
Bitcoin’s value proceeded to fall an alarming 14%, taking many other cryptocurrencies with it. The digital currency behemoth has been struggling to regain its footing ever since.
Musk’s latest statements may put an end to all that.
“It looks like bitcoin is shifting a lot more towards renewables and a bunch of the heavy-duty coal plants were being used… have been shut down, especially in China,” he said.
“I would want to do a little more diligence to confirm that the percentage of renewable energy usage is most likely at or above 50 percent and that there is a trend towards increasing that number. Most likely the answer is that Tesla would resume accepting bitcoin.”
Elon Musk had suggested recently that Bitcoin could return
Although Musk’s latest comments seem to confirm that Bitcoin will return as payment at Tesla, the billionaire engineer also suggested last month that the payment would be accepted if the coin worked to meet certain energy standards.
The electric car maker tweeted in June that he would allow bitcoin transactions again “when there’s confirmation of reasonable (~50 percent) clean energy usage by miners with positive future trend.”
His statement led to a rally in bitcoin which jumped above $40,600.
His post was in reply to a report in Cointelegraph, which cited Magda Wierzycka, the executive chair of South African asset manager Sygnia, as saying Musk’s recent tweets on bitcoin should have prompted an investigation by the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
Musk’s tweets are notorious for affecting the value of bitcoin and other digital tokens in the past few months. Musk had a habit of tweeting about dogecoin, a previously little-known bitcoin competitor, and could send the price of the cryptocurrency soaring.
Bitcoin has been locked in the broad price range of $30,000 to $40,000 since mid-May, when Musk announced Tesla would no longer accept it, and briefly broke below the $30,000 mark on June 22. The cryptocurrency fleetingly traded at $29,700 a day after the People’s Bank of China ordered the country’s major financial institutions to stop facilitating crypto transactions.
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