In brief

  • Remember the “Bad Luck Brian” meme?
  • It’s an NFT now.
  • Someone bought it for $36,000.

“Bad Luck Brian,” an artifact from the halcyon days of top-text/bottom-text impact-font image macros, has returned in NFT form; earlier this week, it sold for $36,000.

It’s part of a slate of auctions on the NFT marketplace Foundation, organized by the digital artist Chris Torres. Torres is responsible for Nyan Cat, which is a cat with a Pop-Tart for a torso—last month, he turned it into an NFT and sold it for over $500,000. Other early-2010s memes in the campaign include “Keyboard Cat” and “Scumbag Steve.” 

The market for NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, started picking up speed late last year; these are cryptographically secured collectibles that can take the form of anything online, from images, to music, to tweets. Back in October, an NFT attached to a Bitcoin-themed physical artwork sold at Christie’s for $131,000.

In 2021, the market has expanded significantly. NFT sales topped $340 million last month, which is more than all of 2020 combined.

AD

Last week, musician and visual artist Grimes sold a collection of multimedia artworks on the Winklevoss twins’ NFT marketplace, Nifty Gateway, for around $6 million. And earlier today, Beeple—now the most recognizable name in crypto art—sold an NFT for a mind-boggling $69 million

Per a description on Foundation’s website, the two friends who masterminded the original “Bad Luck Brian” meme are involved with the new NFT.

Daily Debrief Newsletter

Start every day with the top news stories right now, plus original features, a podcast, videos and more.