“Doge,” the image of an animated Shiba Inu that is one of the internet’s most famous memes, has sold for $4 million as a nonfungible token, making it the most expensive meme NFT of all time. On Friday afternoon, users @twodollahotdoge and @pleasrdao engaged in a bidding war over the meme on Zora.
According to the auction site Zora, on Friday, @pleasrdao submitted a winning offer of 1,696.9 Ethereum, worth nearly $4 million. Atsuko Sato, the owner of the “Doge,” sold the meme.
Japanese dog Shiba Inu memes auctioned :
Netizens use a picture of Kabosu with her paws crossed and a faint smirk on her face. And they add broken English phrases like “Wow. So scare” and “What r u doing?”
“We’re ecstatic to be a part of this milestone in the history of the internet. Doge deserves to be the new meme NFT record holder “Don Caldwell, editor-in-chief of the Know Your Meme meme database, agreed.
Caldwell went on to say that Doge, which he described as “one of the most iconic memes in internet history,” had previously earned the ‘Meme of the Decade‘ award from Know Your Meme in December 2019.
Atsuko Sato, the owner of Kabosu, the dog in the image, first put the meme up for sale on Tuesday. The bidding war lasted for almost three days before being sold to @pleasrdao. The Japanese Red Cross Society and the World Food Programme will both receive some donations from the sale of the NFT.
A recent inflow of memes being sold as NFTs has been dubbed a “meme gold rush” by experts. According to the auction site Foundation, other memes that match Doge include “Disaster Girl,” which sold for 180 Ethereum, worth around $430,000 at the time of sale, and “Overly Attached Girlfriend,” which sold for 200 Ethereum, valued at around $482,000 at the time. A “Pepe the Frog” NFT sold for around $1 million.
The Origin of the Meme :
The term “Doge” comes from the “Homestar Runner” Flash cartoon. In a 2005 episode, Homestar Runner refers to another character as his “D-O-G-E.”
Sato posted the image of Kabosu to his personal blog, not realizing how the photo will explode across the internet and live a life of its own. Sato said in a statement, “I took the images to update my blog. Every day, I shoot a lot of images. Kabosu enjoys having her picture taken, so she was overjoyed when I pointed my camera at her.” In the early 2010s, the image of Kabosu made the rounds on sites like Tumblr and Reddit, and when a Reddit user referred to it as “Doge,” the moniker stuck, and the meme was born.
“I was taken aback when I first learned about the Kabosu memes. ” Sato added. “The fact that a single photo I uploaded to my blog made rounds across the world amazes me.”
Following the meme’s popularity in 2013, two software programmers invented Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency named after the meme. However, as Barron’s observed in May, cryptocurrency is “too crucial to joke off”. Text over the “Doge” meme frequently displays broken English phrases, resulting in terms such as “much hungry” or “extremely NFT.” Due to Dogecoin, the cryptocurrency named after the meme, Doge’s popularity has recently risen.
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