About Doge NFT

Doge NFT and the photography that started it all. From a funny picture of a dog to inspiration for a cryptocurrency that’s now in the top 10 ranking by market cap. Atsuko Sato, the owner of the doge probably never thought that her dog will become an internet superstar.

As time went on and NFTs became a thing, Atsuko decided to post the original doge image as an NFT. It was posted on the Zora auction site and many different people were bidding against each other. The winning bid was $4 million USD worth of Ethereum at that time.

Atsuko said she will donate a portion of funds towards the Japanese Red Cross and World Food Programme. You can think of this NFT as a signed autograph from the original creator of “Doge” photography.

About author

Atsuko Sato, nursery teacher and the original photographer of the “Doge” image is also behind this NFT. It all started when she took a casual photo of her dog named Kabosu and thought it looked kinda funny. She shared the photo on her blog and it went viral. This was way back in 2010, but even 12 years later, the Doge is one of the most popular dogs on the internet.

Since that photo, there were numerous different memes, videos, cryptocurrencies, and other doge-related things made. The original meme format had funny captions with words like “wow, much luck”. The words were not grammatically correct, and it’s still unclear why the exact format was like that. However, it remains like that to this day.

As for the cryptocurrency known as “Dogecoin”, Atsuko has nothing with it. Her dog was the inspiration for the logo of dogecoin which is currently the 10th biggest cryptocurrency by market cap. It looks like Atsuko’s dog Kabosu will be eternally famous.

Who bought Doge NFT?

The auction winner was @pleasrdao, a group of people that are mostly investing in DeFi and NFT projects. One thing is for sure, they own some really early NFTs. When they bought Doge NFT, they didn’t leave it as it is.

What does that mean?

They split the original Doge NFT into fractions of billion different pieces. That means everyone can own a piece for a small fraction of the price, as low as $1. You might be wondering, how is that even possible?

There is a service called Fractional.art that allows anyone to create fractionalized art. Every NFT goes through a verification process, so people cannot scam you that easily. If the team behind Fractional.art successfully verifies the owner, that NFT will have a verification badge. At this moment, there are 7129 unique owners of fractionalized Doge art.

On this service, you can also see the biggest holders, and by the looks of it, “pleasrdao” team actually made a profit by fractionalizing the Doge NFT.

Other than Doge, one of the most popular NFTs they own is “Stay Free” by Edward Snowden. They bought it for approximately $5.5 Million. There are over 50 people on the pleasrdao team, however, that’s still a lot of money.

Some members have revealed their true identity, however, some remain anonymous to the public. Considering the amounts they are spending, it’s no wonder they want to hide their identity.

What marketplace was it sold on?

Doge NFT sold on Zora NFT auction marketplace. There were plenty of bids, but eventually, pleasrdao group won it. Doge was also the highest sale in the history of the Zora marketplace, but there were also some CryptoPunks NFTs sold in the past as well.

Zora is a relatively small NFT marketplace in comparison to OpenSea, SuperRare, and others. However, it looks like this marketplace focuses on limited edition art, rather than collectibles. We don’t know the exact reason why Atsuko has chosen this marketplace, but our guess is because it was new at the time and she is not heavily involved in the NFT space.

We wonder how high it would sell for if it was on a more popular marketplace like the Foundation.app. If she had read our best NFT marketplaces ranking, she would know better.

Does Doge NFT have any utility?

No, Doge NFT does not have any utility.

The new owners did change something on the original NFT though. As we have previously mentioned, they fractionalized the original art and now everyone can own a piece for less than a dollar.

How does it work?

The original Doge NFT was turned into billions of ERC-20 tokens that carry the tag “DOG”. You can buy as many DOG tokens as you can afford. Certain people already own over a million of these tokens.

Each holder of a DOG token can decide the future of this NFT, so we can say this qualifies as some sort of utility. This wasn’t the first NFT to be fractionalized, but it’s certainly one of, if not THE most popular one.

The beauty of NFTs is that the owners can implement additional benefits for the owners later on. It doesn’t have to come right away. Projects can also build on top of the existing smart contracts and tokens.