Twitter’s chief financial officer Ned Segal has indicated that putting some of the social media giant’s idle corporate cash into cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin at the moment “doesn’t make sense”.
Speaking during an interview on Monday, Segal said Twitter would be forced to change its investment policy in order to hold more volatile assets on its balance sheet, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal. The Jack Dorsey-led company prefers to hold less volatile assets like securities, Segal stressed, citing the volatility of cryptocurrencies and the lack of accounting principles for these assets as their top concerns.
Notably, Dorsey is an avid bitcoin fan. Twitter currently allows its 300 million active users to link their accounts to third-party payment channels that let them tip their favorite content creators in bitcoin as well as bring authentication for non-fungible tokens on the platform. Twitter also recently delighted crypto land by starting a dedicated cryptocurrency team aimed at exploring decentralized applications, crypto assets, and blockchain.
Dorsey’s other company, Square, purchased $220 million worth of bitcoin earlier this year. Dorsey announced in mid-Oct that the financial services firm was considering building bitcoin mining rigs.
It should be noted that Dorsey has over the years maintained his decision to embrace bitcoin and bitcoin alone. This has unsurprisingly ruffled the feathers of fans of altcoins like Ethereum who believe the cryptocurrency has a lot of potentials, with some even predicting ETH could one-day flip bitcoin to become the world’s largest cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin Falls Below $60,000
Besides Square, other well-known companies like Elon Musk’s Tesla and MicroStrategy have also invested their spare cash into bitcoin. This trend of corporate adoption was widely hailed as an immense bullish signal.
It’s no surprise, then, that Segal’s latest anti-crypto remarks seem to have spooked traders who opted to reduce their risk shortly after the Wall Street Journal published its article.
The CFO’s comments likely snuffed out any optimism in the wake of the US President Joe Biden signing into law the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill, which included the controversial crypto broker reporting requirement. Senators Cynthia Lummis and Ron Wyden have now introduced a bill to exclude some actors from reporting to the Internal Revenue Services.
Bitcoin is trading 9.03 percent lower as of press time around $59,857.00. The second-largest crypto, Ethereum, also plummeted 10.22 percent on the day and hit $4,245.75 — a level not seen since late October. Today’s market mayhem comes less than a week after both cryptocurrencies set new record highs.
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