After creator Chris Torres sold Nyan Cat as an NFT, he’s up for an even bigger opportunity: a week-long series of auctions where classic memes are sold on the blockchain by their original creators. Torres mentions the opportunity Memeconomy, and he hopes it will give recognition to the meme creators, as well as to the NFT space.
The memes involved should be recognized if you were on the internet in the early 2010s. These include:
There’s also an auction of a new meme: a cross between Twerky Pepe (a popular NFT creator) and the classic Nyan Cat. (Ever wanted to see Nyan Cat? Now you can.)
The event is already underway, and so far the first meme, Bad Luck Brain, has sold for just over $ 37,000. Coughing Cat is currently being offered at auction.
While the memes mostly come from the same era, Torres says it is not intentional. “Honestly, there was no real agenda” regarding the choice of memes, he said The edgeand said that the original meme creators had contacted him independently. He says that he is not going to make money from the auctions himself, he just wanted to help set up the creators so that they could get ‘proper recognition’ after ‘ten years plus’. [it]. ”
While NFTs are supposed to validate ownership, there is no guarantee that the person creating an NFT owns the artwork they sell. There were artists talking about how their work was stolen and NFT-isolated, and Giphy tweeted that it looked at user content used by NFT sites. Torres knows this is a problem and said he made sure everyone he talked to about NFTs was the real creator of the meme and that he owns the rights to it. He also said that meme theft was not a new problem: “sometimes you look over and there is a business that has your photo on a shirt and they earn millions of dollars without even talking to you about it.”
In the short term, the Memeconomy could put some cash (well, crypto) in the pockets of creators and open the doors for them to show recent work, if they have it. It can also work to build a community – to find friends through the organization of the Memeconomy event and through interactions in the NFT space.
In the long run, however, Torres thinks that the meme will become NFTs collectibles, and that ‘eventually someone wants everyone’ and that it will be a big struggle to own all the memes when it comes. “He said he ‘can’t wait to see it look like a VR room with all the memes, like … it’s going to be great, like a big collection of memes.’