Last Monday, a photo of a dog wearing a beanie on a chain sold for just over $4.3 million. It sounds weird, but this photo is not just any dog ​​(perhaps not that different), but Achi, the Shiba Inu from the iconic Internet meme "Dogwifhat": the Shiba Inu. The price of more than 4.3 million US dollars also made this Achi NFT the most expensive meme NFT in history. But this is far from the first high-priced meme NFT. Over the years, the benign intersection of the Internet and encryption culture has contributed to a series of household-known meme NFTs. The following is a list of the most expensive meme NFTs in history. Dogwifhat: $4.3 million

Dogwifhat Meme (partial). Source: Foundation Last week, the Dogwifhat NFT sold for 1,210.759 ETH, worth $4,311,234 at the time of transaction. This sky-high price is largely due to the popularity of the original Dogwifhat meme online since the end of 2019. But the reason why this work fetched such a jaw-dropping price may be more due to the huge success of Solana’s meme coin WIF. In the past few months, the value of this meme coin inspired by Dogwifhat has skyrocketed. Since its creation in December last year, the price of WIF has soared, with its market value exceeding the US$3 billion mark last week. Not long ago, several WIF community members raised nearly $700,000 to put Achi's face on a giant spherical LED screen outside the Sphere in Las Vegas. Auctioneer Path said that this NFT photo was randomly taken by Achi's Korean owner in 2018. After deducting fees, the auction will bring in approximately US$4.1 million, much higher than expected. GCR, a well-known anonymous cryptocurrency trader, acquired the photo through an auction on the digital art platform Foundation. Doge: $4.2 million Kabosu, the meme prototype of Dogecoin. Source: Very.Auction Until last week, the record for the most expensive meme NFT in history was still held by Doge, the originator of all dog memes. The sale, which occurred on June 11, 2021, caused a stir during the heyday of NFTs, with the first multi-million-dollar price paid. The original image was a photo taken by Japanese kindergarten teacher Atsuko Sato of her Shiba Inu Kabosu. This photo also formed the inspiration for the Doge meme. The NFT was eventually sold for a higher ETH price than the Dogwifhat NFT: 1696.9 ETH. However, due to the low price of ETF at that time, it was equivalent to approximately US$4.234 million. The Doge meme was not only an integral part of the internet culture at the time, but also formed the foundation of the crypto world, as it inspired the first meme coin, Dogecoin. “Doge is probably one of the most important memes in Internet culture.” Santiago Santos, a member of the investment collective PleasrDAO who purchased the Doge NFT, said at the time. PleasrDAO subsequently split the Doge NFT into billions of fragmented tokens, creating hundreds of millions of dollars in value and promoting an entire ecosystem of Doge-loving crypto users. Pepe the Frog: $3.5 Million On October 5, 2021, the original Pepe the Frog Genesis NFT created by Matt Furie sold for a staggering 1,000 ETH, worth approximately $3.5 million at the time, and the green amphibian that once took the internet by storm sold It was once exploited by the far right. Of course, Pepe is not only well-known in general Internet circles, but has also long been closely intertwined with crypto culture. Last year it inspired the highly successful meme coin Pepecoin on Ethereum.

It feels great. Source: Matt Furie

Pepe NFT represents the first multi-frame comic file drawn by Furie depicting the character, created in November 2006. The buyer is Starry Night Capital, an NFT fund established in 2021 by crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital and anonymous investor Vincent Van Dough. In 2022, after the bankruptcy of Sanjian Capital, the liquidator confiscated the NFTs held by Sanjian and began to sell them to pay off debts. As part of the liquidation, the Pepe NFT was sold this week to crypto industry executive Andrew Kang with the assistance of Sotheby’s for an undisclosed amount.