From his space spat with Jeff Bezos to his ex-gf Grimes trying to become a meme post-breakup, Elon Musk’s 2021 was full of secondhand embarrassment. But the Musk muck-up that’s seared in our minds from this year is likely when he hosted SNL in May.

According to the LA Times, Musk was the first non-entertainer/athlete to host the show since Donald Trump in 2015, and his hosting gig couldn’t have come at a more bizarre time. Leading up to the show, dogecoin, a cryptocurrency based on the meme of a shiba inu dog, had soared to become the fourth-biggest digital coin by market capitalization. Musk had a big hand in all this—his tweets about the coin, such as “Dogecoin is the people’s crypto,” helped fuel its popularity.

• Dogecoin had become such a frenzy that it accounted for 34% of Robinhood’s entire crypto trading revenue in the first quarter. The trading platform warned that a decline in the price of dogecoin could affect its business.

Well, those fears came true. The price of dogecoin dropped 36% during the Musk’s SNL episode, in which he called the token a “hustle” in a sketch—and it hasn’t recovered. Now, dogecoin is the eleventh-largest crypto by market cap.

But it wasn’t all cringy. Technically, the episode won an Emmy, but it certainly wasn’t for Musk’s Wario impression…or his comedic ability: SNL won the award for Outstanding Contemporary Makeup for a Variety, Nonfiction, or Reality Program for the episode Musk hosted.

Runner up: Mark Zuckerberg’s July Fourth tweet

The Meta CEO released a lot of questionable video content this year, but his Fourth of July post, which showed him holding an American flag while riding a hydrofoil surfboard as John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads” played, probably takes the cake as the cringiest.

Runner up: The “family photo” from the G-7

This year’s group photo from the G-7 summit in Cornwall, England, in June would have made Tyra Banks lose her mind. Top world leaders posed awkwardly before a 3-day meeting in which they discussed pressing topics like the Covid economic recovery and fighting climate change. It was also Biden’s first summit abroad as president.—MM

Walmart, the largest retail giant in the world has reportedly started testing Bitcoin ATM hosting services, as per a report from Coindesk. Walmart has quietly partnered with crypto ATM technology provider Coinme and offering $BTC to customers via 200 of its Coinstar kiosks.

“Coinstar, in partnership with Coinme, has launched a pilot that allows its customers to use cash to purchase bitcoin,” Walmart communications director Molly Blakeman said.“There are 200 Coinstar kiosks located inside Walmart stores across the United States that are part of this pilot.”

The news comes within months of the Litecoin ($LTC) fiasco when a fake Walmart press release claiming to accept $LTC as payment deceived most of the leading news agencies and even Litecoin. At the time many Bitcoin proponents have claimed that it was fake news, given why would world’s largest retail company partner with LTC when there is BTC is adopted left-right and center.

Bitcoin ATMs On the Rise

Bitcoin ATMs have continued to surge in adoption as they touched new highs in 2021. The growth of Bitcoin ATM adoption across the world indicates the rising popularity of the top cryptocurrency among the common public.

The US tops the list of countries with the highest share of Bitcoin ATMs close to 87% of the total ATMs installed across the world.  Now that Walmart is testing with 200 ATMs, the number could only grow further once the company decides to install more machines across its 4,700 stores.

Apart from the US, El Salvador, the first nation to make Bitcoin a legal tender has also installed over 200 Bitcoin ATMs for people’s convenience and ease of transactions. These ATMs are already quite popular and see millions in remittance each day as per Nayib Bukele, the president of the country. El Salvador is the third biggest host of BTMs across the world.