Mark Zuckerberg named his goat 'Bitcoin' - and fans of the cryptocurrency are taking it as an endorsement

• Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared a picture of his goats, Bitcoin and Max, on Monday.
• Crypto fans took the names as an endorsement and tried to figure out the meaning.
• Some have speculated that Facebook owns bitcoin while it works on its own cryptocurrency, diem.

After Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared a picture of his two pet goats on Monday, introducing them to the world as Bitcoin and Max, crypto fans started trying to figure out the significance of the names.

The crypto community overwhelmingly took the name Bitcoin as an endorsement of the digital currency. But the theories didn't end there.

Many people on social media referred to speculation about Facebook buying bitcoin that had surfaced before its quarterly earnings call in April. There was no mention of bitcoin purchases at the time, but some people think Zuckerberg will announce bitcoin investments at Facebook's annual shareholder meeting later this month.

Others took Zuckerberg's post a step further. "Is Mark Zuckerberg telling us he is a bitcoin maximalist with the names of his goats?" Anthony Pompliano, a crypto investor and personality, tweeted. Bitcoin maximalists believe that no other cryptocurrency will be used or needed in the future.

This would contradict Facebook's efforts to develop a stablecoin, diem, which is set to be trialed later this year and would initially focus on user transactions. Diem would be pegged to the dollar and could be used to purchase goods and services, CNBC reported last month.

Some expect that multiple coins, each tied to a fiat currency, and a coin tied to multiple national currencies will be launched eventually.

Diem is a rebranded version of libra, Facebook's crypto-coin project that envisioned one global coin tied to a basket of fiat currencies and linked to Facebook's platform. Concerns about the effect on the global monetary system of a global digital coin owned by a social-media network led to the pivot to diem.

Some crypto fans might see Zuckerberg's post as a threat rather than an endorsement. The Facebook boss said in 2011 that he would eat meat only from animals he'd killed himself, and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey told Rolling Stone in 2019 that Zuckerberg had once served him a goat that he'd killed.

Bitcoin, which has swung from highs of about $65,000 to as low as $49,000 over the past month, dropped after Zuckerberg's post; it was trading at about $55,727 on Tuesday.