One Plush Pepe on Telegram sold for 107,207 TON, which is about 18 million rubles. Here’s a breakdown of how people make money from gifts in general.

Gifts are bought with Stars, and each edition is limited: there are only 2,861 Plush Pepes. After a gift is upgraded to an NFT, it gets a model, background, and pattern, each with its own rarity percentage, and rare combinations sell for many times more. They’re sold on the Telegram marketplace, Getgems, Tonnel, and Portals for GRAM (formerly TON).

The scale: the Snoop Dogg drop brought in $12 million in about half an hour. But the market is volatile: Pepe sales volume fell by a third in March.