Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian has started promoting bitcoin on his Twitter bio after Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Tesla CEO Elon Musk changed their bios on the microblogging platform to promote the cryptocurrency.
Ohanian revealed he was updating his bio on the platform in response to a tweet from tech entrepreneur and former Coinbase chief technology officer Balaji Srinivasan, who pointed out both Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey had changed their Twitter bios to “#bitcoin.”
Some analysts believe that the price of bitcoin surged today because of Elon Musk’s promotion of the cryptocurrency on the platform, in which he has over 43 million followers. CryptoCompare data shows BTC’s price went from about $32,000 to briefly surpass $38,000 thanks to the Tesla CEO’s Twitter bio.
The changes seem to have started a movement with prominent community figures promoting bitcoin. These include CEOs in the space such as Ouriel Ohayon, and even SkyBridge Capital’s Anthony Scaramucci.
Ohanian is a well-known cryptocurrency advocate who has revealed he owns a percentage of his wealth in cryptocurrencies. In 2018, he predicted that the price of bitcoin was heading toward the $20,000 mark that year. While his prediction was off, BTC’s price has since surpassed that mark.
Ohanian is also bullish on Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization. While in 2018 he predicted it would hit $15,000 and ETH’s all-time high is still below $1,500, Reddit has been working with Ethereum, distributing token rewards in specific subreddits.
The company has recently joined the Ethereum Foundation in a bid to provide development resources to scaling tools, improving its commitment to the technology and echoing the platform’s long-held “decentralized ethos.”
In a post on the Ethereum subreddit, Reddit employee u/jarins wrote that in this stage of their partnership “immediate efforts will be focused on bringing Ethereum to Reddit-scale production.”
Our intention is to help accelerate the progress being made on scaling and develop the technology needed to launch large-scale applications like Community Points on Ethereum.
Reddit is set to commit development resources, including a developer team, to work on the project, which could lead to the development of new layer-two scaling solutions for Ethereum. Reddit’s Ethereum-based Community Points could, in the future, scale to its over 50 million users.
Featured image via Unsplash.
