Key facts:
The auction was certified by “Know Your Meme”, the Internet meme database.
Billy Markus, co-founder of DOGE, also launched an NFT series based on the famous meme.
The photograph of Kabosu, a smiling-looking, cross-legged Shiba Inu dog who is known in the ecosystem as the cryptocurrency logo dogecoin (DOGE), was sold on June 11 as a non-fungible token (NFT) for 4 million. of dollars.
The sale of the iconic image of the Japanese dog was hosted by the NFT Zora auction site. The curatorship was in charge of Know Your Meme, the Internet meme database.
As reported by Know Your Meme in a tweet, the winner of the auction is the person identified with the pseudonym @pleasrdao, who made a voluntary offer of 1,696 ethers (ETH), the cryptocurrency of Ethereum. Proceeds from the sale will go to charities, including the Japanese Red Cross Society and the World Food Program.
“We are very happy to be part of this milestone in the history of the Internet. If any meme deserved to be the new NFT meme record holder, it’s Doge, “said Don Caldwell, editor-in-chief of Know Your Meme. The company undertook to certify “Doge” prior to the auction to ensure that it was being sold by its rightful owner.
Caldwell added that, with this sale, Doge becomes one of the most expensive memes, also calling it “one of the most iconic in Internet history.” He recalled that in December 2019 the image won the award given by Know Your Meme as “Meme of the decade.”
The auction opened on June 9, being announced by Kabosu’s owner, Japanese teacher Atsuko Sato, who told her followers on Instagram that she had decided coin the original meme and images from the 2010 photoshoot as NFT. He confirmed that his plan was to auction the photographs of the canine, who is already more than 14 years old, for charitable purposes.
Not in a million years would I have imagined the impact my Kabosu photo shoot would have on the internet. It’s a moment that has evolved and taken on a life of its own over the last decade, shared millions of times, and created a whole community around the Doge meme.
Atsuko Sato, owner of Kabosu.
It was Sato’s blog that propelled Kabosu to internet fame. He started it in June 2009, using photos of his rescued dogs to promote pet adoption. He quickly found an audience among animal lovers. However, Kabosu -rescued from a kennel in 2008- achieved world fame in 2013 as the face of the Doge meme and the Dogecoin cryptocurrency parody.
Dogecoin Co-Creator Sells DOGE NFT Series
The image of the dog Kabosu not only became news due to the auction of its owner, because this week it was also part of another proposal in NFT format.
In this case the offer was made by Billy Markus, engineer and co-founder of DOGE, who decided launch your own cryptocurrency line based on meme cryptocurrency.
The Dogecoin co-founder tokenized the cryptocurrency logo with Doge’s image. Source: Twitter.
According to a message posted on Twitter by Markus on June 8, his wish was to “try something different with new platforms” that would allow him to create multiple copies of the same NFT. Thus, offered more than 420 moving images with various versions of the Dogecoin logo.
The NFTs have been classified into three levels for sale. At the first level, the first 420 DOGE NFTs are auctioned on the Rarible marketplace. There they have been selling for up to 0.6 ethers (ETH), approximately USD 1,500 each at the current exchange rate according to indicates the price calculator of CriptoNoticias.
On the second level, also in Rarible, Three NFTs have already been sold for 0.8 ETH (USD 1,900). While in the third level a single NFT was offered on the Foundation platform, which was sold for 1.5 ETH (around USD 3,600).
All of these auctions appear to have benefited from the interest in dogecoin in recent months. The price of the altcoin it is usually promoted in social networks, especially for the tweets of the CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk, who would have sought to participate in the development of the cryptocurrency since 2019, as this medium recently reported.
Thanks to the popularity achieved, last April DOGE managed to be among the top 10 cryptocurrencies with the highest market capitalization.