Betting On Bitcoins

Startups believe India can become a thriving hub for crypto innovation and have started a campaign to lobby the government to reconsider its proposed ban on cryptocurrencies

- Harichandan Arakali

I should have bought bitcoin eight years ago. I am late to the party. I am a supporter of bitcoin. It’s on the verge of wide acceptance by the financial world.” These are words from Elon Musk as reported on Twitter by fintech entrepreneur Kunal Shah, who attended a meeting recently with the world’s richest man and founder of Tesla and SpaceX on Clubhouse, an audio-chat social networking app.

Musk’s Clubhouse statement was followed a week later, on February 8, by the revelation that Tesla, his electric car company, had bought $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin, the most popular cryptocurrency. “We invested an aggregate of $1.5 billion in bitcoin… and may acquire and hold digital assets from time to time or long-term. Moreover, we expect to begin accepting bitcoin as a form of payment for our products in the near future,” Tesla said in its annual report.

That sent the coin from its already high price up by another 10 percent or so; it was at over $48,000 per bitcoin on February 9.

“It is a bold move, but not entirely a surprise,” says Sathvik Vishwanath, founder of India’s oldest bitcoin exchange Unocoin. Musk had been talking up cryptocurrency for a while, and even changed his Twitter bio briefly to just #bitcoin, he adds.