A tweet by Mexican billionaire Ricardo Salinas Pliego boosts bitcoin

New York (CNN) – The price of bitcoin rose on Monday after Ricardo Salinas Pliego, the owner of Banco Azteca in Mexico, said he was pressuring his country to accept the cryptocurrency and encouraged his Twitter followers to buy it.

“My bank and I are working to be the first bank in Mexico to accept #Bitcoin”, tweeted on sunday. Salinas Pliego has expressed his support for bitcoin and has told his Twitter followers of more than 906,000 to “buy now and don’t sell.”

Salinas Pliego also owns TV Azteca, Mexico’s second-largest broadcaster, and Grupo Elektra, a retail and financial services company. His net worth is nearly $ 16 billion, according to Forbes.

The price of bitcoin has risen approximately 4.3% in the last 24 hours, reaching $ 34,201 per coin, according to Coindesk.

It’s been a rough couple of months for cryptocurrency. Bitcoin, which hit an all-time high of nearly $ 65,000 in April, plunged to $ 28,800 last week after China stepped up its pressure against digital currencies.

As bitcoin tries to rebound from last week’s crash, the specter of increased regulation could keep prices at bay.

Over the weekend, Britain’s financial regulator banned Binance, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, from offering certain services in the country. Japan’s watchdog also said on Friday that Binance is not registered to do business in the country.

On Monday, Randal Quarles, vice president of supervision at the Federal Reserve, shared scathing remarks about the outlook for bitcoin.

“The main additional attractions of bitcoin are its novelty and its anonymity,” he said. “Anonymity will make it the appropriate target for ever closer scrutiny by law enforcement and novelty is a fast depleting asset. Gold will always shine, but novelty, by definition, fades.

“Bitcoin and its like will therefore almost certainly remain a risky and speculative investment rather than a revolutionary means of payment and therefore are highly unlikely to affect the role of the US dollar,” he added.