After selling Nyan Cat as an NFT, his creator, Chris Torres, found himself working on an even bigger event: a series of week-long auctions where classic memes are being sold on the blockchain by their original creators. Torres calls the event Memeconomy, and he hopes it will bring recognition to the creators of memes and also to the NFT space.
The memes involved should be recognized if you are on the Internet in early 2010. They include:
There will also be an auction for a new meme: a crossover between Twerky Pepe (a popular NFT breeder) and the classic Nyan Cat. (Have you ever wanted to see the cat Nyan? Now you can.)
The event is already underway, and so far the first meme, Bad Luck Brain, has sold for just over $ 37,000. The coughing cat is up for auction.
Although the memes are mostly from the same time, Torres says it is not on purpose. “Honestly, there was no real agenda” when it came to selecting memes, he said The Verge, saying that the original creators of the meme contacted him independently. He says he is not going to make money from the auctions, he just wanted to help set up the creators so they could get “proper recognition” after “more than 10 years without [it]. “
Although NFTs must validate ownership, there is no guarantee that the person creating an NFT owns the art they are selling. There have been artists talking about how their work has been stolen and NFT-ized, and Giphy tweeted which was examining user content being used by NFT sites. Torres knows it’s a problem and said he made sure that everyone he spoke to about the NFTs was the real creator of the meme and owned the rights to it. He also said that meme theft was not a new problem: “Sometimes you look and see a company that has your picture on a shirt and is making millions of dollars, even without talking to you about it.”
In the short term, Memeconomia can put some money (in short, cryptography) in the creators’ pockets and open the doors for them to display some recent work, if any. It can also work to build a community – find friends through the process of organizing the Memeconomy event and through interactions in the NFT space.
In the long run, however, Torres believes that NFTs memes will become collectible and that “eventually someone will want to have them all” and that “it will be a big struggle to own all memes when the time comes”. He said “I can’t wait to see this as an RV room with all the memes displayed, that is … it would be amazing, like a large collection of memes”.