Who is the "Top Dog"? A Look at the Seven Most Expensive Meme NFTs in History
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Who is the "Top Dog"? A Look at the Seven Most Expensive Meme NFTs in History
The sale price of over $4.3 million also made the Achi NFT the most expensive meme NFT in history.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsText: Sander Lutz, Decrypt
Translation: Wang Eryu, PANews
Last Monday, a photo of a dog wearing a knitted hat sold on-chain for just over $4.3 million. It sounds unbelievable, but this is no ordinary dog (or perhaps it is)—it’s Achi: the Shiba Inu from the internet's iconic meme "Dogwifhat."
The sale price of over $4.3 million has made this Achi NFT the most expensive meme NFT in history. But it’s certainly not the first high-priced meme NFT. Over the years, the healthy interplay between internet and crypto culture has led to a series of well-known memes being turned into NFTs.
Below is a list of the highest-selling meme NFTs in history.
Dogwifhat: $4.3 million
Detail of Dogwifhat Meme. Source: Foundation
Last week, the Dogwifhat NFT sold for 1,210.759 ETH—worth $4,311,234 at the time—making it one of the most expensive digital art sales ever. This staggering price owes much to the original Dogwifhat meme's popularity online since late 2019. However, the reason this piece fetched such an astonishing sum may be even more tied to the massive success of the Solana-based meme coin WIF, which has surged in value over recent months and was inspired by Dogwifhat.
Since its creation in December last year, WIF’s price has skyrocketed, surpassing a $3 billion market cap last week. Shortly before that, several members of the WIF community raised nearly $700,000 to display Achi’s face on the giant spherical LED screen outside the Sphere in Las Vegas.
Auctioneer Path said the NFT photo was randomly taken by Achi’s South Korean owner in 2018, and after fees, the sale will net the owner approximately $4.1 million—far exceeding expectations. The famous anonymous crypto trader GCR acquired the photo through the digital art platform Foundation.
Doge: $4.2 million
Kabosu, the original meme behind Dogecoin. Source: Very.Auction
Before last week, the record for the most expensive meme NFT belonged to Doge—the original ancestor of all dog memes.
The sale took place on June 11, 2021, during the peak of the NFT boom, making headlines as the first meme to sell for millions. The original image was a photo of Kabosu, the Shiba Inu owned by Japanese kindergarten teacher Atsuko Sato. This photo also served as the inspiration for the Doge meme.
The NFT ultimately sold for more ETH than the Dogwifhat NFT: 1,696.9 ETH. But due to the lower ETH price at the time, it equated to roughly $4.234 million. The Doge meme wasn’t just an essential part of internet culture—it also formed the foundation of the crypto world, as it inspired the first meme coin, Dogecoin.
“Doge is probably one of the most important memes in internet culture,” said Santiago Santos, a member of PleasrDAO—the investment collective that purchased the Doge NFT—at the time. Later, PleasrDAO fractionalized the Doge NFT into billions of tokenized shares, creating hundreds of millions in value and fueling an entire ecosystem of Doge-loving crypto users.
Pepe the Frog: $3.5 million
On October 5, 2021, the original Pepe the Frog Genesis NFT created by Matt Furie sold for a staggering 1,000 ETH—then worth about $3.5 million. This green amphibian, beloved across the internet, had previously been co-opted by far-right groups.
Of course, Pepe isn't just famous within general internet circles—he’s long been deeply intertwined with crypto culture. Last year, he inspired the highly successful meme coin Pepecoin on Ethereum.
Feeling good. Source: Matt Furie
The Pepe NFT represents the first multi-panel comic file drawn by Furie depicting the character, created in November 2006. The buyer was Starry Night Capital, an NFT fund formed in 2021 by the crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital and anonymous investor Vincent Van Dough.
In 2022, after Three Arrows Capital collapsed, liquidators seized the firm's NFT holdings and began selling them to repay debts. As part of the liquidation process, this week the Pepe NFT was sold to crypto industry executive Andrew Kang with assistance from Sotheby’s, though the sale amount was not disclosed.
Charlie Bit My Finger: $761,000
During the 2021 NFT boom, one of YouTube’s earliest iconic videos—“Charlie Bit My Finger”—also went on-chain. Charlie, then teething, and his brother’s parents saw the success of other meme NFTs and hoped to turn their children’s viral moment into a fund to pay for their college education.
The strategy worked quite well: On May 22, 2021, the video’s NFT sold for $760,999 to Dubai-based collector 3FMusic. Initially, the family planned to take the video down from YouTube after the sale to increase the NFT’s exclusivity. However, reportedly 3FMusic didn’t care whether it stayed up, so the video remains on YouTube to this day.
Nyan Cat: $590,000
Nyan Cat is a pixel-art animation of a cat with a Pop-Tart body that first went viral on the internet in 2011. A decade later, its creator and artist Chris Torres considered selling the animation as an NFT. The interest generated by this NFT far exceeded expectations and essentially launched the concept of meme NFTs as an asset class.
On February 19, 2021—before the cultural power of NFTs had fully exploded—Torres sold the Nyan Cat NFT for 300 ETH (worth $590,000 at the time) to an anonymous crypto user. In the months that followed, many other famous meme creators followed in Torres’ footsteps, auctioning off their iconic images as NFTs, finally allowing them to receive meaningful compensation for their pieces of internet history and clearly establish ownership.
“It became a kind of trend, not just for me, but for many meme artists who started creating various works from that point onward. Before that, we all struggled pretty hard,” Torres said in 2021.
Disaster Girl: $430,000
Zoe Roth was one of the earliest legendary meme creators to follow in Torres’ footsteps. As a child, she posed for a photo in front of a burning building, smirking mischievously—a meme that later became the internet’s go-to expression for “schadenfreude.” Known as Disaster Girl, this meme is one of the foundational memes of the early 2000s.
Disaster Girl. Source: Zoe Roth
In mid-2021, Roth auctioned the original photo of the meme as an NFT on the NFT platform Foundation. On April 17, 2021, the NFT sold for 180 ETH—worth around $430,000 at the time. The work ultimately ended up in the hands of 3FMusic, a collector who now owns multiple NFTs on this list.
Overly Attached Girlfriend: $411,000
Spring 2021 was the golden age of meme NFT auctions. Every item on this list except the top spot (Dogwifhat) was sold in 2021—within months of the groundbreaking Nyan Cat sale.
Laina Morris was immortalized in a 2012 meme as the “Overly Attached Girlfriend.” Shortly after the Nyan Cat auction, Morris began exploring blockchain technology and listed the meme photo as an NFT on Foundation.
The sale was successful—Morris received 200 ETH, worth $411,000 at the time. The artwork was also acquired by NFT collector 3FMusic.
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