Mark Lennihan/AP
- Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared a picture of his goats, Bitcoin and Max, on Monday.
- Crypto fans are taking this as an endorsement and are trying to figure out the meaning of it.
- There has been speculation that Facebook owns bitcoin despite the platform working on its own cryptocurrency Diem.
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared a picture of his two pet goats on Facebook on Monday, introducing them to the world as ‘Bitcoin’ and ‘Max’. Crypto fans instantly started trying to figure out the significance of the goats’ names.
The crypto community overwhelmingly took Zuckerberg’s name choice for his goat Bitcoin as an endorsement of the digital currency, but the theories haven’t ended there.
Many social media users referred back to talk of Facebook buying bitcoin that surfaced ahead of the social media network’s quarterly earnings call earlier this month. There was no mention of any bitcoin purchases at the time, but Facebook’s annual shareholder meeting is coming up later in the month and some people now believe Zuckerberg will announce bitcoin investments then.
Others are taking Zuckerberg’s post another step further. “Is Mark Zuckerberg telling us he is a bitcoin maximalist with the names of his goats?” Anthony Pompliano, a crypto investor and personality in the crypto-sphere, tweeted. Bitcoin maximalists believe no other crypto currency will be used, or needed, in the future and bitcoin will remain the most popular and widely used digital token.
This would contradict Facebook’s efforts to develop its own stablecoin, Diem, which is set to be trialed later this year and will initially focus on user-to-user transactions. Diem will be pegged to the dollar and could be used to purchase goods and services.
It is expected that multiple coins, each tied to a fiat currency, as well as a coin tied to multiple national currencies will be launched eventually.
Diem is a rebranded version of Libra, Facebook’s original crypto coin project that envisioned a single, global coin that was tied to a basket of fiat currencies and linked to Facebook’s social media platform. Concerns about the impact of a global, social media network owned digital coin on the global monetary system led to the pivot to Diem.
This is partly why some crypto fans might see Zuckerberg’s post as a threat, rather than an endorsement. The Facebook boss said in 2011 he would only eat meat from animals he killed himself and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey told Rolling Stone in 2019 that Zuckerberg once served him goat that he’d killed personally.
Bitcoin, which swung from record-highs around $65,000 to as low as around $49,000 over the past month alone, dropped after Zuckerberg’s post. It was last trading at around $55,727 on Tuesday.