In an interview with CNBC on Thursday Bill Gates said: "I don't own Bitcoin. Accordingly, I do not sell them." Adding that he has a neutral view on bitcoin but recognizes the importance of reducing the money transaction cost.
The Microsoft co-founder said that digitizing money and reducing transaction costs is "what the Gates Foundation is doing in developing countries."
The Foundation pays special attention to the cancelation of charges, adding more transparency rather than protecting anonymity.
Gates also pointed to bitcoin's volatility caused by the hype and the difficulty of predicting price dynamics.
Earlier in May 2018, he said that he would "short bitcoin if there was an easy way to do it."
He added that he was given bitcoin for his birthday, but he soon sold it.
The bitcoin market has recently experienced increased volatility.
Darius Sith, co-founder and managing director of Singapore-based QCP Capital, warned that while corporate buyers and speculators have pushed the price of bitcoin to several all-time highs this week, the market also currently has excessive leverage, and so there is volatility.
Data from analytics firm Glassnode shows that the average "funding rate" on major exchanges offering perpetual Bitcoin that means futures with no expiration rose sharply by 0.125% to a level not seen since February 2020.
"Given how expensive it is to hold the debt load at the moment, there may be some easing," Sith said.
The funding rate for perpetual contracts is calculated every eight hours and represents the cost of holding long positions. When perpetual contracts are traded at a premium to the spot price, the funding rate is positive. This means that long positions pay for short ones (long shorts). Thus, a high level of financing is considered a sign of excessive leverage bias in the bullish direction - the markets are overbought - this often adds to the market volatility.
A similar situation was observed in the Ethereum (ETH) market after the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization was trading at $ 1928.06 during the Asian session.
