The tokenized photo of the world's most famous shiba inu has been split into billions of individual fractional shares.
A single Dogecoin NFT is now worth more than $225 million. No seriously, close to a quarter of a BILLION dollars for a single non-fungible token.
That comes after the owners of the photo of the shiba inu dog — whose face launched the meme that inspired Dogecoin’s creation as a joke cryptocurrency — was minted onto an NFT by the dog’s owner in June. It already had a valuation suitable to its pedigree, selling for about $4 million in Ether at the time.
The buyer at that time was an investment “collective of DeFi leaders, early NFT collectors and digital artists,” going by PleasrDAO.
The group then split that NFT into billions of individual fractional shares. About 20% of the 16,969,969,969 NFT shares were put up for auction, bringing in approximately $45 million in Ether. (Gee, whatever reason could they have had for choosing that number?)
That puts the value of 100% of the sub-NFTs — known as $DOG, not to be confused with actual Dogecoin’s exchange symbol $DOGE — at $225 million.
This makes the staggering sum put up by PleasrDAO seem like a wise investment indeed.
I Haz $DOG! Much Wow!
The market for the unique tokens, which often carry works of art like Mike “Beeple” Winkelmann’s $69 billion “Everydays” collage, or collectibles like the $1.2 billion CryptoPunk collection, has been on fire this year.
A non-fungible token simply means that each is one of a kind — unlike fungible Bitcoins which are indistinguishable from each other.
PleasrDAO approached the auction with the usual low-key sensibility the NFT market is known for, saying that “it’s very much as if the Louvre decided to fractionalize the Mona Lisa and distribute a portion of it for the public to own,” in a pre-sale blog post on August 31. It added:
“However, unlike at the Louvre, collective ownership of art is really only possible using crypto art. In this digital-first world, NFTs can capture significant moments, phenomena and concepts while a smart contract can fractionalize and distribute them to the public. An incredible thing to witness and be a part of.”
