Bitcoin is little used for trade in the main economies, Tesla had already announced that it would accept it as a form of payment.
Tesla Inc customers will now be able to buy their electric vehicles with bitcoin , its boss, Elon Musk, said on Wednesday , marking a major step forward for the use of the cryptocurrency in commerce .
” Now you can buy a Tesla with bitcoin ,” Musk said on Twitter, adding that the option will be available outside the United States later this year.
The electric car maker had said last month that it had bought $ 1.5 billion in bitcoin and would soon accept it as a form of payment for cars.
Bitcoin , the world’s largest digital currency, rose more than 4% following Musk’s tweet and was last trading at $ 56,429.
Musk said that the bitcoin paid to Tesla would not be converted into traditional currency , but gave few details about how the payments would be processed. The company is using “internal and open source software,” he said.
Most of the mainstream companies that allow customers to pay with bitcoin , such as AT&T Inc and Microsoft Corp , usually use specialized payment processors that convert the cryptocurrency into, for example, dollars and send the sum to the company.
Like other cryptocurrencies, bitcoin remains little used for trading in major economies , hampered by its volatility and relatively expensive and time-consuming processing.
Musk , who regularly posts cryptocurrency comments on Twitter, last month criticized conventional cash , saying that when it “has negative real interest, only a fool would not look elsewhere.”
Following Tesla’s investment in bitcoin, companies like Mastercard Inc and Bank of New York Mellon Corp have embraced the emerging asset , prompting predictions that bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies will become a regular part of investment portfolios .
Tesla recently added “Technoking of Tesla” to Musk’s list of official titles.