The cryptocurrency market has been something of a roller coaster in the last month or so – but that doesn’t mean people aren’t still making big bucks off of the trend. In fact an NFT (Non Fungible Token) has sold for a record $4 million. What’s ironic is that the NFT in question is in image of “Doge,” the Shiba Inu dog (real name “Kabosu”) that became a smash-hit viral meme, and eventually became the icon and namesake of the currently hot and popular “Dogecoin” cryptocurrency brand, which was endorsed by Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
The NFT of the Doge meme image was sold to one “@pleasrdao,” who won with a bid of 1,6969.9 of the cryptocurrency Ethereum, which approximates to about $4 million. The meme image was put up for sale by Kabosu’s owner, Atsuko Sato, and certified by the meme database Know Your Meme prior to the auction. Editor-in-chief Don Caldwell released this statement on the sale:
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“We’re so happy to be a part of this milestone in internet history. If any meme deserved to be the new meme NFT record holder, it’s Doge… one of the most iconic memes in internet history.”
The Doge meme won Know Your Meme’s coveted ‘Meme of the Decade’ award in December of 2019, further cementing its status as one of the most popular memes online, since memes became a thing in the 2010s. The popularity of the meme attracted a number of high-rolling cryptocurrency bids, with two bidders (@pleasrdao and @twodollahotdoge) getting into a serious bidding war for the Doge NFT.
The Doge meme was named after a line of dialogue from the Flash-animation comedy web series Homestar Runner (possibly its spinoff Biz Cas Fri) in which a character refers to another character as his “D-O-G-E.” Years later (in 2010), Atsuko Sato was updating her personal blog with a picture of her dog Kabosu, who apparently is very camera-friendly. “”I take a lot of pictures every day, so that day was nothing out of the ordinary,” Sato once shared. “Kabosu loves having her photo taken, so she was delighted to have the camera pointed towards her.”
Kabosu’s photo became a hit on Tumblr and Reddit early in the 2010s, and it was on the latter that the nickname “Doge” was put to the photo, sparking the meme.
“When I first found out about the Kabosu memes, I was very surprised. I was terrified at the thought that just one photo I had casually posted on my blog could spread all over the world to places I didn’t know,” Sato added.
NFTs are currently putting seriously big price tags on quite a few popular Internet sensations from the last decade. In addition to Doge, The “Disaster Girl” meme was sold by the young girl in the photo (Zoรซ Roth) for nearly half a million dollars as an NFT; the “Bad Luck Brian” meme was sold for $36,000, and the web video “Nyan Cat” sold for $600,000, while the popular Harambe meme also went on sale.
via: NBC News
