Bitcoin Price Rises As Paul Tudor Jones Backs the Crypto, MicroStrategy Makes $488m Bet

Bitcoin saw a sharp rise in price on Monday on the back of an endorsement from Wall Street figure Paul Tudor Jones as well as news of a large investment from a software company.

Tudor Jones, a U.S. billionaire hedge fund manager, said on Monday that he liked bitcoin as a tool for diversifying portfolios and added that he would like the cryptocurrency to make up a part of his overall wealth.

He told CNBC's Squawk Box finance program: "Everybody asks me what should I do with my bitcoin? The only thing I know for certain, I want 5 percent in gold, 5 percent in bitcoin, 5 percent in cash, 5 percent in commodities.

"At this point in time, I don't know what I want to do with the other 80 percent until I see what the Fed is going to do."

Tudor Jones' comments came a day after Elon Musk, billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, set out the conditions under which Tesla, his electric car company, would continue accepting bitcoin as payment.

He said in a tweet: "When there's confirmation of reasonable (~50%) clean energy usage by miners with positive future trend, Tesla will resume allowing Bitcoin transactions."

In May, Musk announced that Tesla had stopped accepting the cryptocurrency as payment due to environmental concerns. Bitcoin mining—the process used to essentially mint new coins—is energy intensive.

And in other news, the business intelligence software company MicroStrategy announced on Monday that it was planning to buy $488 million worth of bitcoin using the income gained from a bond sale.

"MicroStrategy estimates that the net proceeds from the sale of the notes and the related guarantees will be approximately $488 million […] MicroStrategy intends to use the net proceeds from the sale of the notes to acquire additional bitcoin," said the company said in a press release.

The company added it has an existing bitcoin portfolio of "approximately 92,079 bitcoins," worth around $3.7 billion at the time of writing.

Bitcoin, along with other cryptocurrencies, is notorious for price volatility. Experts have previously warned Newsweek about the dangers and risks associated with cryptocurrency trading.

The price of bitcoin was worth around $36,000 just before midday EDT Sunday before rising to around $41,000 at the same time on Monday.

It then declined slightly and is currently worth $40,100, up 2.6 percent over the past 24 hours and up over 20 percent over the past seven days. These figures are likely to change.

It follows a couple of months in which the price of bitcoin has declined from a high of more than $64,000 on April 14.