Another day, another meme sold as an NFT. Back in 2015, Asif Rasa Rana of Gujranwala announced in a Facebook post that he had not been friends with Mudasir Ismail Ahmed since he became best friends with Salman Ahmad Naqash.
After Rana and Naqash posted an image of their shaking hands with Ahmed omitted, the post went viral, and social media users used it as a template for memes about breakups, political controversies, and other mundane issues.
As of today, six years after Rana and Ahmed split on Facebook, the “Friendship ended with Mudasir” meme was sold as Pakistan’s first meme NFT (non-fungible token) for $51,530, or 20 Ether, the cryptocurrency associated with Ethereum.
In the NFT sale, a company called Alter took part in the digital art marketplace Foundation. As a result, Rana and his friends will receive the majority of the auction earnings, while Alter will receive a smaller portion.
Discussing his meme-acquired fame, Raza told VICE World News.
“I only posted it so Mudasir would see it and get upset….I would never have known that [the post] would go so viral and that it would spread all over the world. So many news agencies interviewed us. We’ve even had a cartoon made about us,” said Raza. “The people of Poland love it so much. I received Polish visa offers from two or three people. They even wrote my name on the walls there.”
NFT collectors and cryptocurrency enthusiasts have widely appreciated the auction. According to Alter’s co-founder, Zain Naqvi, some digital creators in Pakistan find it difficult to jump onto the NFT bandwagon due to shifting cryptocurrency policies and limited opportunities.
Cryptocurrency assets such as images and videos that represent intangible items are called NFTs. The ownership of NFTs is recorded on the blockchain, which allows trading of the digital assets they represent as stand-ins for NFTs.
NFT sales surged from $13.7 million at the beginning of 2020 to $2.5 billion by the end of 2021. Plenty of other people have benefited from the NFT craze as well. In an NFT exchange, a Polish influencer recently sold her love Gallery for $250,000. In June, Larva Labs sold an NFT for $11.8 million for a digital artwork titled CryptoPunk – a set of 10,000 pixel-art characters. The “Disaster Girl” meme also made $500,000 off the NFT.
“Disaster Girl” | Meme Credit: Dave Roth
An adorable video of Harry and Charlie, two brothers, sitting in a black chair. A toddler nibbles a single finger gleefully. The clip was then posted to YouTube by their father (so that the godparents could see it), and it became one of the first huge viral videos on the platform. The NFT auction resulted in a successful sale of $760,999. Here’s the video of Charlie bit my finger meme: