Cryptocurrency prices started June on a down note after a less-than-merry month of May.
Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency, early Tuesday was down 1.1% to $36,281. Bitcoin had touched a record $64,000 in April.
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Ethereum slipped 1.4% to $2,548, while Dogecoin dropped 1.5% to 32 cents, according to Coingecko.
May was a tough time for cryptocurrency. China reiterated a call for a crackdown on Bitcoin mining and trading, while the People’s Bank of China said digital coins weren’t “real currencies.”
Miners in China account for about 71% of bitcoin mining energy consumption, with miners in the U.S. and Russia responsible for about 7% each, according to the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance.
Cathie Wood, the founder of ARK Investment Management, said Tesla (TSLA) – Get Report CEO Elon Musk and the environmental-social-governance movement were responsible for the recent drop in digital currencies.
Tesla last month stopped accepting Bitcoin as payment for its electric vehicles, citing environmental concerns. A recent analysis from Cambridge suggested that Bitcoin used more electricity than the country of Argentina.
“It was precipitated by the ESG movement and this notion, which was exacerbated by Elon Musk, that there are some real environmental problems with the mining of bitcoin,” Wood said at the Consensus 2021 conference organized by CoinDesk.
“A lot of institutional buying went on pause.”
Wood said she remained confident of the future of Bitcoin, which she described as the first rules-based “global monetary system in the world,” CoinDesk reported.
Tom Lee, co-founder of independent research firm Fundstrat Global Advisors, was also positive about Bitcoin’s future, writing in a research note that “despite another set of ‘negative headlines,’ Bitcoin actually rose $2,000 over the weekend.”
“I can’t help but view this as reinforcing the likelihood Bitcoin has bottomed, given bad news is not creating new lows,” Lee wrote.
Last week, TheStreet.com’s Corey Goldman interviewed Dogecoin investor Glauber Contessoto that “memes are the language of the millennials and in the future, we’ll be buying and selling things with memes.”
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