ApeCoin soared by 20% in minutes after Elon Musk put a Bored Ape as his Twitter profile picture

Tesla CEO Elon Musk changed his Twitter profile picture to a montage of the Bored Ape non-fungible token collection, sending the value of its related cryptocurrency soaring. ApeCoin, the cryptocurrency that was started by Yuga Labs who are the creators of the Bored Ape NFT, was up nearly 20% as of 8 a.m. on Tuesday. At the time, it was trading at US$17.64 per token. Later in the day, ApeCoin lost some of those gains. It was up 3% as of noon on Tuesday when it was trading at US$15.15. The image that Musk posted on his Twitter profile was created for Sotheby's sale of the NFT, according to Michael Bouhanna, an executive at the auction house. "As much as I admire your work I'd like you to remove your pfp that I created for our Sotheby's sale," Bouhannah tweeted on Tuesday.

Musk did not reply to Bouhanna, though he did write about NFTs, tweeting: "I dunno … seems kinda fungible." The Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), which is one of the most popular NFT collections on the market, features 10,000 apes on the Ethereum blockchain. Yuga Labs, the Miami-based startup backed by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, sold 10,000 BoredApe NFTs last week, netting US$285 million. Musk's past tweets about cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin and dogecoin, have led to wild fluctuations in their value.

While many users were speculating if Musk may have become a member of the coveted non-fungible token (NFT) community, others noted that his profile picture didn't have the Twitter-standard hexagonal display profile picture. This hexagonal feature is the true marker that annotates if someone is an actual NFT owner, or if they just copied and pasted a screenshot of the image. Musk seems to be the latter when it comes to his new BAYC picture.

Over the weekend, Bored Ape creator Yuga Labs made US$320 million-selling "Otherdeeds," Ethereum-based virtual land deed NFTs for its yet-to-be-released, highly-anticipated metaverse project "Otherside." Purchases could only be made with ApeCoin, a cryptocurrency that is technically separate from Yuga Labs but has been adopted by the company for the Bored Ape ecosystem.

However, the sale came with a lot of problems. Ethereum became so congested with transactions that the blockchain was pretty much unusable for hours, and users were left spending thousands on fees on failed transactions. This took a toll on the price of ApeCoin.

Although ApeCoin surged 50% and hit an all-time high on Thursday of US$26.70 in anticipation of the Otherdeeds sale, it sank afterward on Monday.

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