Bitcoin rose to nearly $48,000 on Tuesday after the US Securities and Exchange Commission said in a fake tweet that it had approved spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds.
The false tweet, posted on
Fifteen minutes later, SEC chief Gary Gensler tweeted from his own account: “The @SECGov account has been compromised and an unauthorized tweet has been posted.” “The SEC has suspended the listing and trading of spot Bitcoin exchange-traded products not approved.”
After the false tweet, the token briefly jumped to its highest level since around March 2022. It reached its all-time high of almost $70,000 in November 2021.
Shortly after Gensler's second tweet early Tuesday evening, the price fell below $46,000, just below where it had been for most of the day.
Bitcoin rose to nearly $48,000 on Tuesday after the US Securities and Exchange Commission said in a fake tweet that it had approved spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds. Shortly after it was revealed that the account had been compromised, the price dropped below $46,000
The tweet, published at 4:11 p.m., came from the SEC's official account
At 4:26 p.m., SEC Chairman Gary Gensler posted his own tweet indicating that the official SEC account had been “compromised.”
The question was immediately raised as to who would be behind such a “compromise” and who would benefit from it.
Gensler's tweet was flooded with replies, with other
It is possible that the account was hacked to inflate the price. Experts believe that a significant profit could be made if coins were sold during the peak.
Accounts for
However, experts point out that hackers can get around these problems – either by accessing the phone or emails, or by using blackmail to put pressure on someone who has access.
Bitcoin was up nearly 10 percent to over $47,000 on Monday as investors grew increasingly optimistic that the SEC will approve a spot Bitcoin ETF.
Regulators face a deadline on Wednesday to approve one of around 10 pending applications from asset managers for a Bitcoin ETF – a fund that behaves like a stock and roughly tracks the value of the cryptocurrency.
Geoffrey Kendrick, head of financial research at Standard Chartered Bank, told investors in a note this week that approval was imminent and would “most likely” occur on January 10.
The token had fallen to just over $46,500 on Tuesday afternoon, but this week it is reaching its highest level since March 2022. Its all-time high of just under $70,000 was reached in November 2021
Applications for a Bitcoin ETF are pending from around 10 asset managers. The SEC must make a decision on at least one by Wednesday. Pictured is the SEC headquarters in Washington, DC
Major investment firms such as BlackRock and Fidelity have applied to operate Bitcoin ETFs, but the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has not yet approved them
If approved, he predicted that Bitcoin could reach $200,000 by the end of 2025.
“We view this as a turning point for the normalization of Bitcoin participation by institutional funds and expect the approval to result in significant inflows and price appreciation for BTC,” Kendrick wrote.
Standard Chartered also predicted that between $50 billion and $100 billion will be invested in U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs by the end of this year.
To justify the position that ETF approval will lead to a significant inflow of money into Bitcoin, Kendrick pointed to investments in gold following the approval of a gold ETF in 2004.
Within ten years, the price of an ounce had risen more than fourfold, he emphasized in the note.
“We use this 4.3x price increase as our base case scenario for Bitcoin, but we assume BTC gains will occur over a shorter period of one to two years as we assume the BTC ETF market will mature faster.”
But Gilles Ubaghs, strategic advisor for commercial banking and payments at Datos Insights, told last year that investors should exercise caution.
Ubaghs noted that Bitcoin is not particularly valuable as an actual currency and questioned its long-term value.
“It's complicated, difficult to spend and pay off, [has] “The reputation is dubious and, above all, it is so volatile,” he said.
Still, he acknowledged that while it has limited practical use for payments, it still functions as a “digital asset” that can have a similar value to gold or fine wines.
“Ultimately, while Bitcoin is a fairly weak means of payment, it is also unlikely to die out any time soon,” Ubagh wrote.