But rather awkwardly, bids are only being accepted in Ether... not DOGE.
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There is so much to say about an auction that could bring in a small fortune for charity by selling the since-reupholstered couch an internet-famous dog was lounging on when a good photo turned it into a meme and then a cryptocurrency.
But we'll start with this: Why is the Doge Couch being auctioned for Ether and not Dogecoin?
Perhaps we should back up. NFT art collective PleasrDAO has — it says — gotten its hands on the original couch that Kabosu was lying on when a photograph turned her into the most famous Shiba Inu on the planet.
It will be sold on PleasrDAO's somewhat unique PleasrHouse NFT auction site on Feb. 7. The charity Save the Children will get 90% of the proceeds, PleasrDAO said.
Originally a straightforward internet meme dating to 2010, the photo of Kabosu was appropriated by Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer when they spent a few hours building a joke cryptocurrency designed to be unusable as a payments coin.
They failed miserably.
Kept alive for seven years by a fanatic community, Dogecoin was sent into orbit when Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter CEO Elon Musk started tweeting Dogecoin memes in 2021. $DOGE is now a top 10 cryptocurrency with a market capitalization that's currently a bit more than $12 billion.
In August, Layer 2 Dogechain was launched for the Dogecoin blockchain.
A Stunning Story
How did PleasrDAO get its hands on the original couch, and how do we know it's authentic even though it was reupholstered from yellow to gray at some point?
Well, there's a couple of good answers, one being that Kabosu and her owner, Atsuko Sato, will be on hand during the livestreamed, 24-hour-long auction for a Q&A.
But a better answer is that PleasrDAO bought the original Doge meme photo — minted into a one-off NFT — at auction in 2021, paying 1,696.9 ETH, then about $4 million.
So it kind of stands to reason that they have a good relationship with Sato.
What PleasrDAO is selling is an NFT of the couch that comes with the right to the actual couch (pickup and delivery not included or arranged.)
The actual DOGE NFT was promptly fractionalized into 16.96 billion $DOG tokens, with various perks, with 20% of the total supply selling for 11,000 ETH — $45 million. Making the original Doge NFT worth a very theoretical $225 million.
Sadly, it seems Kabosu won't be needing her couch for much longer. Already 17 — two years past a Shiba Inu's average lifespan — it was reported in outlets ranging from the Washington Post to the U.K.'s Daily Mail on Dec. 28 that 17-year-old Kabosu was very sick with leukemia.
