The most expensive meme NFT ever sold will be auctioned off in 17 billion pieces tonight

• The Doge meme non-fungible token (NFT), which sold for $4 million back in June, can now be owned by anyone.
• The owner, an organisation called PleasrDAO, is splitting the NFT into 17 billion pieces and putting them up for auction tonight at 10:00 pm Indian Standard Time (IST).
• Only 20% of the new ERC-20 tokens called ‘$DOG’ will be going up for auction initially and 25% are being set aside for the coin’s development as well as associated projects.

The iconic Doge meme non-fungible token (NFT), which was sold for a massive $4 million back in June, made history by becoming the most expensive meme NFT ever sold. And, now its new owner plans to auction off the NFT by dividing it into 17 billion pieces.

The original NFT —a meme based on a Shiba Inu named Kabosu — was sold by the dog’s owner, Atsuko Sato, to PleasrDAO — a decentralised autonomous organisation that focuses on art.

On September 1 at 10:00 Indian Standard Time (IST), PleasrDAO plans to let others bid for their stake on Miso, an open-source smart contract platform. Simply put, the holy grail of internet culture is now open to community ownership — anyone can own a piece of it.

What does fractionalisation mean?

According to PleasrDAO, the auctioning of the Doge NFT is akin to the Louvre fractionalising the Mona Lisa and distributing a portion of it for the public to own.

The Doge NFT will be fractionalised into 16,969,696,989 ERC-20 tokens named ‘$DOG’. And, initially only 20% of that will be up for purchase. One fourth of it has been allocated to $DOG community programs and future development of the coin.

The rest will be auctioned off once $DOG reaches ‘full meme escape velocity’, which in the crypto world means when the price is expected to keep rising even if supply is increased. Simply put, PleasrDAO will only open up the supply tap once the token has enough strength and speed to continue its positive momentum.

And, this is not the first time that PleasrDAO has gone the way of community ownership. They also bought Snowden’s landmark win, which ruled that the US’ National Security Agency (NSA) violated the law with their mass surveillance techniques.

What makes the Doge meme NFT so special?

The Doge meme holds a special space in the heart of the crypto community. Shiba Inu is actually a girl, not a boy as many assume, who was rescued from a puppy mill by Sato — a Japanese kindergarten teacher.

Kabuso came into the limelight on Atsuko blog, where she published posts to raise awareness about the dangers of puppy mills.

In 2013, it was made the face of a cryptocurrency ‘as a joke’ by tech billionaire Jackson Palmer. Less than a year from coming into existence, the Dogecoin community on Reddit pooled funds together in order to send the Jamaican bob-sled team to the Winter Olympics in Russia.

But, that was the last anyone heard of the coin for a while — that is until tech billionaire Elon Musk stepped into the picture with the legendary tweet, “Who let the Doge out?”


Skipping over the many controversies since then, Doge is currently the seventh largest cryptocurrency in the market at a market valuation of $36.9 billion, according to data by CoinMarketCap.

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