Bitcoin emoji triggers viral Twitter trend

The emoji, or ‘hashflag’ in Twitter terminology, spread like wildfire across the social network as crypto influencers such as Lightning Labs co-founder Elizabeth Stark and Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao rushed to test out the new graphic.

A long time coming

Twitter first launched custom emojis in 2015 and has been known to charge companies seven figures for the privilege of using the little graphics as promotional tools in marketing campaigns.

Though Bitcoin has no official spokesperson to request or pay for such an icon, it does have evangelists like Morgan Creek Digital’s Anthony Pompliano, who first suggested the idea to Dorsey in October last year, much to the delight of the Bitcoin Twitter community.

Renowned Bitcoin bull Dorsey was unlikely to ignore the suggestion down. He heads up the crypto payment provider Square, openly admits to investing in cryptocurrency, and even took hold of the Lightning Torch last time it made the rounds on Twitter.

When he tweeted the new emoji for the first time, Dorsey tagged unicode, which approved its own Bitcoin symbol in 2017, and confirmed his commitment to bitcoin by adding the emoji to his profile description.

After five months of waiting, the sudden release of the graphic in the run-up to the Bitcoin halving suggests Dorsey might have been waiting to capitalize on a wave of positive sentiment.

There are fewer than 100 days until the highly-anticipated halving event, the price of bitcoin is approaching the key $10k milestone, and the crypto market sentiment indicator is lurching away from fear and towards greed.

We’ll tweet to that.