In brief
- An NFT tied to an image of the Doge meme sold for over $4 million on Wednesday.
- A group called PleasrDAO won the bidding war.
An NFT tied to an image of Doge, the Shiba Inu that found fame as a meme before becoming the face of one of crypto’s most valuable coins, sold on Friday for over $4 million.
The buyer was PleasrDAO, a group of investors whose collection includes NFTs from Edward Snowden and the Tor Project, and the marketplace was Zora, an online auction house that's partially funded by Coinbase's venture arm.
More specifically, PleasrDAO is a DAO, or “decentralized autonomous organization”—a kind of blockchain-based corporate governance structure. Each member of the DAO holds a token that represents a fraction of the group’s treasury and an equal say in group decision-making (a little like voting shares in a traditional company).
“We purchase and collect pieces which we believe are timeless and priceless mementos of digital and crypto culture,” said Santiago Santos, a PleasrDAO member and a partner at the crypto investment firm ParaFi Capital. “Doge is perhaps one of the most important memes of internet culture.”
Why This DAO Bought Snowden’s NFT for $5.4 Million
A disparate band of NFT art collectors is harnessing the power of smart contracts to create a decentralized digital art investment empire. Their latest purchase: an NFT minted by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden for $5.4 million. “If people haven’t started paying attention, they should,” digital artist pplpleasr told Decrypt from her home in Taiwan. She’s responsible for the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) behind the sales. It’s called PleasrDAO, and formed last month when a group of...
NFTs are non-fungible tokens: coins that can be auctioned as proof of ownership for digital goods (usually files like JPEGs and GIFs). Even as the market for crypto collectibles has died down over the past few months, high rollers have continued to invest: Sotheby’s sold an NFT yesterday for over $17 million.
Early 2010s image macros like Doge have proved a popular (and lucrative) use case for NFTs. Tokens attached to “Nyan Cat,” “Overly Attached Girlfriend,” and “Disaster Girl” have all sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The irony of spending $4 million on a meme isn’t lost on PleasrDAO, and their winning bid suggests they aren’t taking themselves too seriously. The final figure, 1,696.9 ETH, is an unsubtle sex joke; earlier bids also factored in “420” (the weed number!) and “1337” (gamer slang for “elite”).
The Men Who Pump Doge: Meet the Redditors Behind the Dogecoin Billboards
Times Square is a terrible place—an oppressive, blue-lit canyon defined by the perennial blare of ad slogans and looming mascots. You know the brands because they’re always the same: Coca-Cola, Netflix, Disney, M&M. But last week, a different sort of figure appeared in Times Square, one conspicuously untethered to corporate interests: a visitor in the form of Doge—the wide-eyed Shiba Inu that’s been a meme for the better part of the past decade—on a small screen above the 45th street Polo store....
“The 69s, 420s, and 1337s are all memes in their own right,” Santos said.
