CRYPTO CLAWS: Katy Perry is getting on the bitcoin bandwagon

Bitcoin isn't just a wildly speculative bubble struggling not to collapse under the weight of its own success. It's also a fashion accessory - if you're Katy Perry, that is.

Growing numbers of celebrities are lining up to praise the purported wonders of the cryptocurrency boom, and the pop star is joining their ranks. On Thursday, she posted a photo to her Instagram account of her nails painted with the logos of various high-profile cryptocurrencies.

Bitcoin is there, along with its smaller sibling litecoin, as well as ethereum and the privacy-focused monero. The caption? "$-CrYpTo ClAwS-$".

And this isn't the first time Perry has used cryptocurrencies to promote her personal brand. Back in November 2017, she posted a photo of herself having a chat with legendary investor Warren Buffett. "nbd just asking Warren Buffett his thoughts on cryptocurrency," she wrote.

Media personality and businesswoman Paris Hilton has also got in on the crypto hype.

In September 2017, she publicly promoted the ICO, or initial coin offering (a mechanism for company fundraising that involves selling cryptographic tokens to investors, similar to an unregulated IPO), of a marketing-AI-blockchain platform called LydianCoin.

She quietly deleted her tweet, however, after attention was drawn to the fact that it was being led by a man previously convicted of domestic assault.

Boxer Floyd Mayweather was relatively early to the ICO game, hyping up prediction market Stox in July 2017. "I'm gonna make a $hit t$n of money on August 2nd on the Stox.com ICO," the boxer wrote on Instagram, alongside a photo of him sitting on a private jet next to literal piles of money.

floyd mayweather money ico
Floyd Mayweather/Instagram
Stox went on to raise $30 million (£23 million) - and was subsequently promoted by another high-profile sportsperson on Instagram, Uruguayan footballer Luis Suarez. "You can call me Floyd Crypto Mayweather from now on," Mayweather later told his followers.

The price of bitcoin - and other cryptocurrencies - has skyrocketed over the last 12 months, from less than $1,000 to highs of almost $20,000. But since then it has undergone a major correction, and is currently hovering around the $11,000 mark.

Bitcoin is under serious strain from all this attention. Due to technical limits on the number of transactions it can handle, the network is being overloaded, meaning payments can face fees of tens of dollars each and take hours to process - making it effectively useless as an actual day-to-day means of payment.

Some businesses that previously accepted bitcoin payment are not ending their support for the cryptocurrency, despite its popularity, because these issues make it too technically challenging to handle.

Gaming platform Steam removed it as a payment option in December 2017, and payments startup Stripe dropped it earlier this week, explaining: "Empirically, there are fewer and fewer use cases for which accepting or paying with Bitcoin makes sense."

Biz Inside : Rob Price