Par Florian Ginez, Associate Director, Quantitative Research, WisdomTree

“Crypto assets have had a wild weekend, with bitcoin trading as low as $42,000 this morning[1]. After announcing a $1.5bn investment in bitcoin in February and starting to accept payments in bitcoin for its cars about a month ago, Tesla is now doing a U-turn and will stop accepting the digital currency. Rumours and speculation around whether Tesla had sold or plans on selling its position has driven the market down over the past few days, fuelled by cryptic tweets from Elon Musk, who implied they might have sold or were planning to sell on Sunday[2], before tweeting this morning[3] that Tesla had not sold any of its bitcoin position.

“The official reason underpinning Tesla’s decision to stop accepting payments in bitcoin are concerns around the environmental impact of cryptocurrency. Given these concerns should be the same now as they were when the company announced its positive stance on bitcoin a few months ago, investors are now wondering what the real motive behind this change is.

“As a new asset class, any development that may affect the outlook for adoption can have a sharp impact on price. These events represent potential entry points new investors and help to remind us that any investment needs to be done in a risk adjusted way. The future looks bright for cryptocurrencies but deciphering the exact path of adoption is almost impossible. For this reason, digital assets currently represent a niche, but growing, part of a portfolio with allocations spread across high conviction crypto assets”.

[1] Source: Coindesk as 17 May 2021

[2] 16 May 2021

[3] Source: Twitter, 17 May 2021

Retrouvez l’ensemble de nos articles Business ici