1) Dogwifhat: $4.3 million
This week’s massive Dogwifhat NFT sale—which clocked in at 1,210.759 ETH, worth $4,311,234 at the time of purchase—owes much of its success to the popularity of the original Dogwifhat meme, which emerged online in late 2019. But more than anything else, the piece likely fetched such an eye-popping price due to the runaway success of WIF, a Solana meme coin inspired by the meme that has exploded in value over the last few months.
Since its creation in December, WIF has skyrocketed in value. Last week, the token reached a record $3 billion market capitalization, shortly after several WIF community members raised nearly $700,000 to plaster the face of Achi—the dog featured in the meme—on Sphere, the massive LED screen-covered arena in Las Vegas.
The NFT photo was auctioned by Achi’s South Korean owners, who netted some $4.1 million on the sale after fees—far more than they ever expected to earn from the photo of their puppy they casually took in 2018, auction coordinator Path told Decrypt. The photo sold to GCR, a prominent pseudonymous crypto trader, via an auction on the digital art platform Foundation.
2) Doge: $4.2 million
Kabosu, the meme mascot of Dogecoin. Image: Very.Auction
Prior to last week, the record for most expensive meme-related NFT of all time was held by the godfather of all dog-related memes: the original Doge.
That sale made waves back in the heyday of the NFT boom, on June 11, 2021—when an NFT of the original photo that inspired the Doge meme, taken by Japanese kindergarten teacher Atsuko Sato of her Shiba Inu Kabosu, sold for millions of dollars (then a first).
The NFT ended up selling for a larger sum of ETH than the Dogwifhat NFT: 1,696.9 ETH. Due to Ethereum’s lower price at the time, though, that sum equaled roughly $4.234 million. The Doge meme wasn’t just integral to internet culture at the time; it was also foundational to crypto, having inspired Dogecoin, the first-ever meme coin.
“Doge is perhaps one of the most important memes of internet culture,” Santiago Santos, a member of investment collective PleasrDAO, which purchased the Doge NFT, told Decrypt at the time.
PleasrDAO then proceeded to split the Doge NFT into billions of fractionalized tokens, a move that generated hundreds of millions of dollars in value and has since fueled an entire ecosystem of Doge-loving crypto users.
3) Pepe the Frog: $3.5 million
On October 5, 2021, the original Pepe the Frog Genesis NFT—created by Matt Furie, the artist behind the internet-famous green amphibian at one point co-opted by the alt right—sold for a whopping 1,000 ETH, worth about $3.5 million at the time of sale.
Pepe, of course, does not only have cachet in general internet circles; the meme has long been deeply interwoven with crypto culture, and as recently as last year inspired Pepecoin, an Ethereum meme coin that’s seen major success.
The Pepe NFT represents the file of the first-ever comic panel drawn by Furie depicting the character, created in November 2006. It sold to Starry Night Capital, an NFT fund established by crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital and pseudonymous investor Vincent Van Dough in 2021.
When Three Arrows collapsed in 2022, the liquidator behind the firm’s bankruptcy proceedings seized NFTs in its possession and began selling them off to pay back creditors. Just this week, as part of that liquidation process, Sotheby’s brokered a sale of the Pepe NFT to crypto executive Andrew Kang for an undisclosed sum.
