Elon Musk’s Tesla made immense headlines in the crypto-verse following the inclusion of Dogecoin [DOGE]. Despite being Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency, DOGE took a while to make it to Tesla. Bitcoin [BTC] was the first crypto asset to bag a spot in the firm. However, this didn’t last too long. Citing the damages caused by Bitcoin mining, Musk pulled Bitcoin out of the picture.
While there is no information on when Tesla might resume accepting payments in Bitcoin, the financial statements of the firm revealed that it was still holding on to some BTC. The electric car manufacturer’s Q4 financial report pointed out that it hadn’t purchased or sold any Bitcoin since the previous quarter.
In its balance sheet, Tesla’s digital asset holdings were at $1.260 billion back in September 2021. During the end of the fourth quarter in December 2021, this number remained the same.
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Back in February 2021, the firm purchased Bitcoin worth $1.5 billion, ahead of onboarding the king coin for payments. BTC was priced at around $33k, during the time. To further test the liquidity of the asset, the firm sold about 10% of its BTC, during Q1 2021. Following this, no purchases were made during the second quarter of the year.
Tesla’s love-hate relationship with Bitcoin
Elon Musk has time and again expressed keen interest in the crypto-verse. However, his move of onboarding Bitcoin into Tesla was regarded as a prominent move. This certainly put him on a pedestal. Soon after he pointed out the environmental damage that Bitcoin mining entailed, the entire community was enraged.
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Bringing back hope into the industry, in July 2021, Musk dropped hints about Tesla accepting BTC once again. Speaking at the B-Word cryptocurrency conference he said,
“I wanted a little bit more due diligence to confirm that the percentage of renewable energy usage is most likely at or above 50%, and that there is a trend towards increasing that number, and if so Tesla would resume accepting Bitcoin.”
Additionally, at the time of writing, Bitcoin was aiming for recovery but it seemed harder than it looked. The world’s largest cryptocurrency was trading for $36,425.58 with a 3.33% drop over the last 24-hours. Its market cap took a major hit as it plummeted below $700 billion.