TESLA chief executive Elon Musk has confirmed that the company was “most likely" going to resume taking Bitcoin payment after some due diligence on the improvements in the energy mix used to mine the cryptocurrency.
During the B Word conference, Musk said on Wednesday that there had been improvements and Tesla would do more due diligence to confirm that, but he expected the automaker would resume accepting crypto payment, reports Electrek.
“I wanted a little bit more due diligence to confirm that the percentage of renewable energy usage is most likely at or above 50 percent, and that there is a trend toward increasing that number and if so, Tesla would resume accepting bitcoin,” Musk said.
“Most likely the answer is that Tesla would resume accepting bitcoin.”
He also confirmed that he had a significant personal investment into bitcoin on top of Tesla’s investment and he had smaller Ethereum and Dogecoin holdings.
Over the past year, Tesla has been delving deep into the cryptocurrency world at various levels.
Earlier this year, Tesla invested $1.5 billion (about R22bn) in Bitcoin. Shortly thereafter, the automaker started accepting the cryptocurrency as payment on new vehicles.
Later, Musk spoke about the potential of Tesla starting to accept Dogecoin as payment for its vehicles.
However, a few days later, Tesla took a step back from crypto by removing the Bitcoin payment option.
The company noted concerns over the energy needs of the Bitcoin network.
This is a concern that many Tesla community members shared when Tesla first announced its Bitcoin investment and many were angered by the fact that the company had not thought about it in the first place.
At the time, Tesla noted that it was not selling its stake in Bitcoin and that it planned to resume taking Bitcoin payments once the network showed a higher mix of renewable energy.
IANS