How is Elon Musk driving momentum for the Crypto Curious?
Momentum for “crypto curious” is on the rise, from an MFactor score of 3 in late December 2020 to a score of 16 in May 2021. The "crypto-curious audience" is defined as people who don't own cryptocurrency today but indicate either wanting to learn more about it and/or are planning to buy it soon. About 13% of adults in the US plan to buy cryptocurrency in the next 12 months (about 19.3 million people). That amount of Americans considering investing in cryptocurrencies would nearly double the current population of investors.
Crypto Curious MFactor. MFactor is a proprietary tool that measures cultural momentum through topic modeling and sentiment analysis.
How is Elon Musk driving momentum for the Crypto Curious?
The latest surge in momentum for the crypto-curious was driven by Elon Musk: hosting SNL and taking a contradictory stance on cryptocurrencies. Elon’s massive influence is polarizing.
Ahead of his hosting SNL on May 8th, 2021, Dogecoin investors and the crypto curious were hopeful the “Technoking” would sing Dogecoin’s praises and pump its value. Instead, Elon joked that Dogecoin was just a “hustle”, causing Dogecoin’s value to crash from it's all time high. Elon later tweeted that he was “working with Doge devs to improve the system transaction efficiency”, contradicting his SNL performance but still raising the value of Dogecoin again. The value for Dogecoin might not be back up at its all time high but the momentum is continuing to surge thanks to Elon’s continued tweeting.
Dogecoin MFactor. MFactor is a proprietary tool that measures cultural momentum through topic modeling and sentiment analysis.
What happened with Elon Musk & Bitcoin?
In the same week Musk announced that Tesla would no longer accept Bitcoin as a form of payment for the cars. This is despite Tesla confirming they are still not selling their over $1 billion investment in Bitcoin. His contradictory stance on Bitcoin caused the price to fluctuate: a cryptocurrency with a $1 trillion market cap – down as much as 17% with a tweet noting that he now believes Bitcoin is bad for the environment and that Tesla will not be accepting Bitcoin payments for its cars after all.
Where do the crypto curious go from here?
Elon Musk helped fuel mass awareness and generate excitement / intrigue for crypto. He helped fuel interest amongst the crypto-curious, but companies like Coinbase and Gemini are helping to explain crypto more deeply. Both crypto exchanges are engaging the crypto-curious by building trust through education, transparency and a simple user-friendly product.