Vietnamese NFT game’s token value doubles after Elon Musk tweet

The official Twitter account of Musk posted Tuesday a tweet which read “tau > pi.” It had received over 33,800 likes and been retweeted 3,384 times as of Wednesday afternoon.

Musk didn’t clarify what the cryptic Tweet meant. Both Tau and Pi are mathematical constants, with Tau having twice the value of Pi.

TAU is also the name of the token used in an NFT game called “Atlantis Universe,” advertised as a “blockchain based metaverse project.” The game has been developed by a Vietnamese team since the third quarter of 2021.

Just 10 minutes after Musk’s tweet, the value of a TAU token jumped from 77 cents to $1.44 at around 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, according to CoinMarketCap, a web service which provides aggregated cryptocurrency market data. The trade volume of the token also increased 10 times from $90,000 a day to nearly $1 million a day.

The official Twitter account of “Atlantis Universe” also retweeted Musk’s tweet.

Two screenshots of Elon Musk’s Tweet on February 22, 2022 (above) and a chart of changes to the TAU token’s value on CoinMarketCap.

Cryptocurrency investors attribute the sudden increase in the TAU token’s value to Musk’s tweet. According to financial publisher InvestorPlace, Musk’s tweet might have referred to projects like Atlantis Universe, associated with the TAU token and the Pi Network. Musk could have implied that he regarded a token from one project higher than another’s, though there has been no concrete indication for such an assumption.

TAU is also the name of a token from another blockchain project called Lamden, which also saw an increase of 10 percent in value, from 5.4 cents to 6 cents within the same period, according to CoinMarketCap.

Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, is no stranger to his tweets shaking up global markets, even with no obvious intention to influence. The values of several “memecoins,” cryptocurrencies originating from Internet memes or those with humorous characteristics, like Floki or Shiba, have had moments when they skyrocketed following Musk’s tweets, and there have been those that saw their values drop significantly as a result.

“Atlantis Universe” is a project under development and has not been officially released.