The Bored Ape NFT collection has garnered a cult-like following since its inception in April 2021.
Jakub Porzycki | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Elon Muskon Wednesday changed his profile picture onTwitterto an image featuring various avatars from the Bored Ape non-fungible token collection, sending the price of the projectâs digital token soaring.
ApeCoin, the token launched by Bored Ape creators Yuga Labs, surged 19% in an hour at around 8 a.m. ET to a daily high of $17.64 following Muskâs profile picture change, according toCoinbasedata. Itâs since pared back its gains and was last trading at about $15.43.
Itâs not clear whether Musk actually bought a Bored Ape NFT. The billionaire liked a tweet from Michael Bouhanna, an executive at auction house Sothebyâs, who said the image was âcreated for our Sothebyâs sale.â
âHappy to send you the original file minted with the buyer approval,â Bouhanna wrote in the tweet.
It suggests Musk may have merelyright clicked and savedthe picture to make it his profile image. Twitter has adedicated featurethat allows users to set their NFT as a hexagonal display picture, but Muskâs avatar is just a standard profile image.
NFTs are meant to authenticate ownership of everything from digital art to sports memorabilia on the blockchain. But theyâve attracted ridicule from skeptics, given itâs easy to continue replicating and distributing the associated content online without buying a token.
Musk â who recentlyagreed a deal to buy Twitter for $44 billionâ appeared to poke fun at NFTs in a follow-up tweet.
âI dunno ⊠seems kinda fungible,â theTeslaand SpaceX boss posted.
NFTs are designed to not be fungible â in other words, they canât be exchanged interchangeably.
Itâs not the first time Muskâs activity on Twitter has led to wild movements in asset prices. Numerous tweets by the Tesla and SpaceX boss have caused the price ofbitcoinanddogecoinâ a âmemeâ cryptocurrency favored by Musk â to rise or fall dramatically.
The Bored Ape NFT collection has garnered a cult-like following since its inception a year ago, with everyone from diehard crypto investors to celebrities like Jimmy Fallon buying up the buzzy ape icons.
This weekend, Yuga Labs minted a collection of deeds to virtual land in anupcoming âmetaverseâ game called Otherside. Demand for the NFTs, known as Otherdeeds, was so high that it clogged up theEthereumblockchain, which underpins the worldâs second-biggest cryptocurrency.
That caused Ethereumâs âgas feesâ â costs required to approve transactions â to skyrocket. Some users reported having to pay fees in excess of $4,000. Yuga Labs subsequently apologized over the debacle, and said it would refund users gas fees for any failed transactions.
âWeâre sorry for turning off the lights on Ethereum for a while,â the company tweeted Saturday. âIt seems abundantly clear that ApeCoin will need to migrate to its own chain in order to properly scale.â
In a further tweet Sunday, Yuga Labs said it was âstill working on refunding all Otherdeed minters with failed transactions their gas.â
Despite the brief boost Wednesday, the ApeCoin token has fallen roughly 17% in the past week. With a market value of $4.4 billion, it ranks among the top 40 digital currencies on CoinGecko.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/04/apecoin-token-surges-after-elon-musk-twitter-profile-change.html