National Business Wire (Jan 10) -- Billionaire Elon Musk-owned social media platform X, formerly Twitter, confirmed on Tuesday that an unknown party had compromised the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's official account @SECGOV.

The platform noted that as per the findings of its preliminary investigation, "the compromise was not due to any breach of X's systems, but rather due to an unidentified individual obtaining control over a phone number associated with the @SECGov account through a third party."

X's safety team said that the @SECGov account did not have two-factor authentication enabled at the time of the breach. As a result, it advised all X users to enable "this extra layer of security" to prevent account compromise.

Earlier, the @SECGov X account announced that it had approved spot-bitcoin exchange traded funds (ETFs).

The news caused the price of Bitcoin (BTC) to spike to nearly $48,000, but it quickly fell back to around $46,000 after SEC Chairman Gary Gensler clarified that the tweet was "unauthorised."

CoinGlass data shows that the incident led to more than $50 million liquidation in the cryptocurrency market within an hour, and has caused crypto bigwigs to call for an investigation into the market manipulation.

Bitcoin ETFs have received a lot of attention recently, and their approval will increase the number of ways investors can invest in bitcoin.

Major financial firms including BlackRock, Fidelity and others have already submitted applications to the SEC for spot-bitcoin ETFs, and earlier the market expected Wednesday to be the time when the SEC would announce its final decision.