Cryptocurrencies are highly volatile. Prices of even the most popular cryptos like Bitcoin and Ether can fluctuate wildly in a matter of hours. This is because these assets do not have any inherent value. Instead, their price action is dictated by what people are willing to pay for them. Therefore, any sort of hype, excitement, and fear around a cryptocurrency can lead to a change in its price.
For that matter, even something as small as a 280-character tweet can influence prices in a big way, making investors very rich or very sad in a very short period of time. While this may seem hard to believe, it has actually happened on more than one occasion in the last few years.
Here’s a look at some of these tweets:
El Salvador President Nayib Bukele
In September of 2021, El Salvador became the first country to adopt Bitcoin as a legal tender. This was a monumental shift for the cryptocurrency movement as most countries at that time were still figuring out how to regulate this asset class.
President Naybi Bukele, an avid bitcoin enthusiast, took to Twitter to announce the news. He sent out a series of tweets, starting with an announcement that El Salvador had purchased 200 bitcoins and culminating with a tweet that read, “in 3 minutes we make history”.
Following the tweets, the price of Bitcoin temporarily increased by 1.49 percent, reaching a high of $52,680 on the day (7th September 2021).
Elon Musk – Bitcoin rally
Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s influence on the crypto market through his countless tweets has been unbelievable. Musk has often tweeted about bitcoin and dogecoin, resulting in soaring and falling price actions.
At the start of 2021, Musk changed his Twitter bio to #bitcoin, resulting in BTC seeing a spike of 20 percent. In February, he tweeted in favour of bitcoin while having some choice words for fiat currency.
“Fiat currency has negative real interest, only a fool wouldn’t look elsewhere,” and then adding, “Bitcoin is almost as BS as fiat money. The key word is ‘almost’.”
The tweet in February led to bitcoin reaching the price point of $55,000.
Michael Saylor – the Bitcoin whale
One cannot mention Elon Musk and his tweets without touching upon Michael Saylor, the CEO of MicroStrategy. Like Elon, Saylor too has caused spikes in bitcoin prices through his tweets. He took to the microblogging platform several times during Bitcoin’s rally from 11K to 60k in 2021; either to announce MicroStrategy’s new bitcoin purchase or just to promote the cryptocurrency as a whole.
Regardless, it almost always resulted in positive price action for Bitcoin. His tweets also moved the needle for Bitcoin’s investor sentiment and tweet volume. Studies have shown that, on average, his tweets led to a 2.2 percent increase in the price of Bitcoin. They also pushed investor sentiment by 0.8 percent and tweet volume by 4.1 percent.
Mark Cuban
The shark tank alumni and the owner of the NBA team Dallas Maverick, Mark Cuban, has been a staunch supporter of blockchain technology and, specifically, the utility of smart contracts implemented in blockchains like Ethereum.
In February of 2021, Cuban, who had historically been a supporter of Ethereum, surprisingly started favouring dogecoin.
In his February 4th tweet, he said, “If I had to choose between buying a lottery ticket and #Dogecoin…..I would buy #Dogecoin. But please don’t ask me to choose between it and anything else.”
This sent the price of dogecoin soaring, rising by more than 50 percent in the span of 12 hours.
Elon Musk – Bitcoin crash
Not long after Elon tweeted in support of bitcoin, Tesla unveiled that they had purchased tokens worth $1.5 billion and would allow BTC to become a payment method for purchasing their cars.
But in a surprising turn of events in May 2021, Musk tweeted an image that revealed that Tesla was halting BTC payment due to environmental concerns about the asset. The price of Bitcoin fell substantially after that tweet, reaching an all-time low of $34,000 by the end of May.
Crypto.com arena
Crypto.com, whose vision was to “put cryptocurrency in every wallet”, made some bold moves in November. They turned to marketing in a big way, including Twitter, to boost the popularity of their platform and native token Cronos (CRO).
Aside from hiring Matt Damon for a commercial, crypto.com announced in a tweet that they had bought the naming rights of the staples sporting arena, the home of the LA Lakers, and they were changing its name to Crypto.com arena.
This led to a significant rally of the CRO token, taking it to an all-time high of $0.9005. Since then, it has not been able to reach this price point again.
Andre Cronje – resignation tweet causes multiple tokens to tumble
Earlier in the month (March 2021), prolific developer Andre Cronje announced in a tweet that he would be quitting the DeFi space. Within a matter of hours, dozens of tokens that he helped develop began to tumble. The native token of Yearn Finance (YFI) dropped by as much as 12 percent.
Similarly, the native token of the recently released protocol, Solidly, a hybrid Automated Market Maker (AMM), fell by as much as 75 percent on the day of the tweet. Automation platform Keep3r’s token also dipped by as much as 25 percent. The native token of the lending platform Iron Bank also plummeted by around 50 percent.
