Musk says Tesla to use bitcoin transactions when mining cleaner

Tesla Inc. will resume allowing Bitcoin transactions when mining the digital coin is done with more clean energy, Elon Musk said in a tweet Sunday.

The transactions will start back up “when there’s confirmation of reasonable (~50%) clean energy usage by miners with positive future trend,” Musk said after confirming the electric-car maker had sold about 10% of its Bitcoin holdings.

The billionaire said the sale was done “to confirm BTC could be liquidated easily without moving market.” His tweet was in reply to a report in Cointelegraph, which cited Magda Wierzycka, executive chair of South African asset manager Sygnia, as saying Musk’s recent tweets on Bitcoin should have prompted an investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The cryptocurrency was up 4.1% to $37,494.43 as of 2:59 p.m. in New York. The billionaire has whipsawed Bitcoin and other digital tokens with a string of social media posts in the past few months.