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Since yesterday, rumours have been circulating that Facebook has bought bitcoin.
It all started with a tweet from the CIO of Altana Digital Currency Fund, Alistair Milne, according to whom rumours are circulating that Facebook might announce today that it has bought bitcoin.
RUMOUR: Facebook will annouce they hold #Bitcoin on their books when they release their quarterly results after trading closes tomorrow
— Alistair Milne (@alistairmilne) April 27, 2021
The tweet, which is apparently the only source of this rumour, has gone around the world, and the rumour has spread like wildfire.
All that is certain is that today, 28 April 2021, the “Facebook Q1 2021 Earnings” event will be held at investor.fb.com, during which the company will present its financial results for the first quarter of 2021.
During these days, all listed companies, such as Facebook, are presenting their quarterly reports, and according to rumours reported by Milne, the first quarterly report of the year of the social network co-founded by Mark Zuckerberg would include an investment in BTC.
Basically, it would be something similar to what Tesla did, except that the company founded by Elon Musk declared its investment in bitcoin almost immediately to the SEC. There is no record that Facebook has ever reported to the SEC that it has invested in bitcoin, and given that almost a month has passed since the end of the first quarter of 2021, it would seem strange that the company is only now publicly disclosing its investment.
Facebook, bitcoin investment awaiting confirmation
There are therefore many who are sceptical about the rumours reported by Milne, not least because there is no confirmation of any kind regarding this hypothesis.
So it would be no surprise if Facebook did not declare today that it had invested in bitcoin at all, although it would also be no surprise if it confirmed this hypothesis.
Facebook actually entered the cryptocurrency market two years ago, in 2019, when it announced that it was working on a blockchain-based stablecoin (Libra, later to become Diem). This project, while not a cryptocurrency, is in some ways very similar to, for example, Tether or USD Coin, and denotes a clear interest of the company in these technologies.
Indeed, after discovering that Elon Musk himself, and PayPal CEO Dan Schulman, have also bought bitcoin, it is hard to imagine that someone like Mark Zuckerberg has not. Hence it would also be fair to imagine that the company he currently heads might have done so.