Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
Murphy’s First Law certainly applied to yesterday’s events in the crypto world as the market crashed following actions from two of its most beloved figures, Elon Musk and Vitalik Buterin.
The first act was played by Vitalik and the meme coin SHIB (incidentally just listed in Binance), one of the most successful dog themed coins created on the coattails of Dogecoin.
As part of its tokenomics, Shib decided to send 50% of its supply to Vitalik’s address, as a marketing ploy, not expecting him to do anything. Yet out of the blue he decided to send $1B of $SHIB tokens, as well as other similar coins he was given, to the India COVID-Crypto Relief Fund and other charities. A charitable move for all intended purposes.
However the market reacted poorly and Bitcoin tanked soon after, as SHIB plummeted along with many dog or moon related tokens. Many people mistook the events for a rug on Vitalik’s part, and some newcomers to the space even asked who he was.
Just as the market began to recover, the second act came as a tweet by Elon Musk stating that Tesla was suspending the acceptance of Bitcoin as a form of payment for their vehicles, citing environmental concerns over the use of fossil fuels to power the mining of Bitcoin.
The company introduced Bitcoin for payments with great praise from the community just last month.
Tesla did specify that they would not sell any Bitcoin and were looking for more environmentally friendly cryptocurrency alternatives; however, the damage was done and Bitcoin dipped below $50k effectively crashing the whole crypto market.
Ironically Vitalik and Musk, perhaps some of the two most influential people in the crypto tight knit community were responsible for its biggest dip in a quite a while, demonstrating just how much Social Media does influence the market as a whole.