KEY POINTS
In a recent auction, a non-fungible token (NFT) featuring a photo of a dog wearing a hat was sold for $4.3 million.
The dog in question is Achi, a Shiba Inu puppy, whose owners decided to take a photo of him wearing a small hat in 2018, and it quickly went viral on the internet. It soon turned into a meme coin known as “$wif.”
Its popularity also resulted in its transformation into an NFT under the name “Achi, the dog wif hat.” The NFT recently went up for auction on the Foundation marketplace.
The auction started on March 15 and concluded on March 18, with a winning bid of 1,210.759 ETH, equivalent to $4,344,203 at the time of the sale. The winning bidder is a user who goes by the pseudonym GCR and is known as @GiganticRebirth on X (Twitter).
This auction becomes the second-largest one ever registered on Foundation, as reported by the marketplace via an X post.
While this is one of the few instances where an NFT not belonging to some of the most popular NFT collections has been sold for such a price, other individual NFTs have also achieved multimillion-dollar sales.
At the beginning of the month, a CryptoPunks NFT, #3100, sold for over $16 million, marking the second-largest sale in the collection’s history. In another notable instance, in November 2023, EthBoy, an NFT artwork portraying Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin, broke records with a $400k resale on OpenSea, signaling a resurgence in the NFT market.
Since their introduction in 2014, NFTs have revolutionized the art world and addressed many prevalent challenges within the industry. Notably, the ability to verify the original creator and receive recognition, including for subsequent sales, provides artists with deserved acknowledgment.
Despite the NFT market’s frequent downturns over the past year, the outlook for this year appears promising. Ethereum, Solana, and Bitcoin-based NFTs have all seen an increase in sales and volumes during the initial months of 2024. Notably, at the start of this month, Bitcoin NFTs took the lead in weekly sales, exceeding $172 million and surpassing their main competitors, Ethereum and Solana.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated with some modifications.
