Do you remember when meme-NFTs became a real trend? I only recently ran into the story of the most expensive meme-NFT sales and realized I’d missed the wild times of 2021. It turns out that a photo of the dog Achi in a hat from the internet meme Dogwifhat was recently sold for 4.3 million dollars! This became the most expensive meme-NFT in history.

But here’s the funny part—this isn’t the first case. Before Dogwifhat, the record was held by Doge ( the same shiba inu Кабосу ), which was sold in 2021 for 4.2 million. Remember how Doge inspired the creation of Dogecoin in the first place? Back then, the investment collective PleasrDAO split this NFT meme into billions of fragments and created an entire ecosystem. A wild story.

Then comes Pepe the Frog—a green frog that conquered the internet. Its original NFT by Matt Furie went for 3.5 million in 2021. It’s funny that this meme later inspired Pepecoin on Ethereum.

And do you know what’s most interesting? Most of these meme-NFTs were sold in 2021, when the whole market was going crazy. Nyan Cat—the pixel cat with a cookie in its body—became the very ancestor of the trend. Chris Torres sold it for 590 thousand dollars in February 2021, and after that, all the other meme creators understood: hey, you can make money from your own creations! Disaster girl Zoe Roth, Overly Attached Girlfriend Laina Morris—all of them followed suit and listed their iconic images as meme-NFTs.

The funniest thing is that collector 3FMusic bought a few of the items from this list. A typical crypto collector from 2021. And overall—this was a wild era when internet stories literally cost millions. Now I understand why everyone was talking about the meme-NFT revolution back then.