Elon Musk Might Look to Pump Nano After Crashing Bitcoin

Market manipulation can come in many forms. Some investors are referring to Elon Musk's reversal of Bitcoin payments for Tesla as a pump and dump scheme. With Bitcoin tanking, will Musk attach himself to Nano next?

Nano is still an altcoin, although it has integrated with a major crypto exchange, which gives it enough legitimacy for an upswing. 

Nano's 53 percent gain in just 24 hours is extraordinary, especially as Bitcoin's value drops. The coin can be traded through Binance and numerous other startup exchanges like Kraken, CoinEx, and Probit. Nano is currently valued at $13.49. That's 0.000264 the value of Bitcoin, which puts it 71st in ranking for cryptocurrency value.

Despite the recent upward trajectory, Nano is still a fraction of its all-time high of $33.31 back in 2018. That's a long way to climb for early investors. The current popularity rests on Bitcoin's downfall and Nano's potential to fill in the gaps where Bitcoin fails.

Musk announced that he would accept Bitcoin as payment for Tesla purchases. Shortly after, he reversed his decision. This led critics to call Musk out for manipulating the market, insinuating a pump and dump situation.

The hashtag #dontbuytesla started trending on Twitter. Reportedly, Musk changed his mind due to environmental concerns over Bitcoin. 

As an electric car company, Tesla is inherently sustainable. The cryptocurrency market has been under fire recently for its massive carbon emissions (one Bitcoin ETF manager is even offsetting their carbon through Amazon forest restoration).

Musk said, "We are concerned about rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for bitcoin mining and transactions, especially coal, which has the worst emissions of any fuel."

Tesla stock is down 10.78 percent over a five-day period. Bitcoin is down 14.2 percent during the time timeframe. Meanwhile, Nano is up 33.33 percent. 

In his announcement about terminating the Tesla-Bitcoin relationship, Musk stated that the company will be looking at cryptocurrency options that use just a fraction (less than one percent) of Bitcoin's energy per transaction.

It takes 556 days to mine a single Bitcoin, which is why the annual global energy usage for the coin is more than the country of Argentina consumes. This amounts to 250 kWh per transaction.

Nano is a fee-free coin that's reportedly more efficient as it works on a block-lattice data structure. To put it simply, each account mining Nano has its own blockchain. Nano uses something similar to the proof-of-stake protocol (like the new Ethereum 2.0). 

It isn't clear what Nano's per-transaction energy cost comes out to be, but Tesla is likely investigating the numbers as we speak.

Musk is a big fan of cryptos like Bitcoin and Doge. Many people say that there isn't any way he didn't know about Bitcoin's environmental issues before making his announcement (given that he runs a $500 billion company). Whether or not it was a pump and dump is something that governmental organizations like the SEC and Federal Reserve will have to determine. 

Is Nano next? If it passes the environmental criteria, perhaps.