What is The Doge NFT ($DOG)?
Firstly we must know two things. Who is the Doge? And what is an NFT?
In 2005, a very special Shiba Inu was born: Kabosu, the world’s most famous dog/meme. If we trust Wikipedia, Kabosu is a pedigree dog of highest renown, sent to an animal shelter after the puppy mill from whence she was born, was shut down. Praise be to the animal shelter.
In 2008, a kindergarten teacher named Atsuko Satō adopted the precious Doge, and two years later, on February 13th, 2010 she did something that would change the world forever. She photographed her doggo for a personal blog. Atsuko took eight photos on this fateful day, but one of them rose above the rest.
The seemingly innocuous image of Kabosu, with an enigmatic expression, slowly spread throughout the interwebs. After posting on her blog, Satō’s darling Shiba appeared on Tumblr, with some text overlaid in comic sans. Kabosu spoke to us, and thus, became a meme. THE meme.
But 2013 was the time for Doge to shine. Kabosu’s image was being shared all over the internet, and even got an embarrassing mention in US Congress- oh, how the powerful will attempt to wield the tools of the masses. But the masses got their just deserts when in December of 2013, @billym2k created DOGECOIN (heard of it?).
Touted as the people’s coin/the currency of the internet/the funniest shitcoin, DogeCoin was an instant hit. The tokenomics were terrible and it was always a joke, but people like jokes, so they bought it and championed its memetic powers.
Let’s jump forward to today.
What is an NFT?
Basically, you can create a token on the Ethereum network (or another network), which can’t be broken down into smaller pieces (making it non-fungible). You can then attach something to that token, burying it within the code. This could be anything with a digital presence, but at the moment, it’s mostly JPEGs. So, an image, which is connected to a token, and has all the trustless verification benefits of cryptocurrencies. Voila, NFTs.
There are plenty of potential use cases for NFTs and maybe they’ll revolutionize all sorts of industries in the not too distant future. Or maybe not. No one knows.
But what we do know is that in June 2021, Atsuko Satō minted a 1/1 NFT for each of the photos she took, eleven years prior, and put them up for auction on Zora.
The most popular and famous image of course, our heroic Doge with the Mona Lisa smile, received the most attention. The NFT sold for a record 1696.9 ETH ($5.5M USD at the time). The buyer? PleasrDAO.
PleasrDAO is a collection of web3/crypto natives who banded together and formed a DAO with the intention of buying culturally significant works of art (they also bought the Wu Tang Clan’s unique single pressing of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin).
Now PleasrDAO officially owns the official NFT of Kabosu the Doge, officially minted and sold by Kabosu’s official owner (and this can all be verified on the blockchain). But that’s not enough. After all, Doge is the people’s meme, the people’s dog, and should be celebrated by people all over the world.
So PleasrDAO used Fractional.art to fractionalize the NFT, which birthed a new cryptocurrency: $DOG. The total supply of $DOG is 16,969,696,969 and there will never be more tokens than that.
Using Miso, PleasrDAO auctioned off the NFT fractions, the $DOG tokens. Only 20% of the total supply was available to buy. PleasrDAO retained 55% and the remaining 25% was set aside as a Community Fund for the yet-to-be-birthed $DOG community.
And knoweth ye that thusly the people did bid. $DOG was disseminated throughout the land and the people were happy, knowing that they had just purchased something very special. Holders of $DOG coin literally own a piece of the official, original, Doge meme. Do you want it? You’ve got it!
At the conclusion of the Miso auction, the $DOG community was born. There’s a Twitter and a Discord, and a Reddit, and an Insta, and yes, even a TikTok (OnlyFans coming soon).
Community leaders were appointed, and PleasrDAO let the nascent $DOG community grow at arm’s length.
So there you go, that is The Doge NFT in a nutshell. But this is only the beginning.
Remember that Community Fund? Well, it’s already been put to good use. The Bark Tank Council was created to vet applications from community members who had plans to grow the community, spread the gospel of Doge, or just add some WOW to the world.
Some wild ideas have been funded so far, including The Pixel Project, which allows $DOG holders to stake their holdings and get a pixel from the NFT randomly allocated to them. 55240 $DOG coins are required per pixel because there are 16 969 696 969 tokens, and there are 640 x 480 pixels in the image. Dividing tokens by pixels gets the magic staking number.
The $DOG community voted to bring on HYPE Partners, PR masterminds, who are launching their campaign right now to bolster this unique project.
They also voted to stake $500,000 with the sole purpose of periodically donating the yield it grows. Donating to dog charities of course.
You see, the $DOG community is wholesome and fun, and wants for the world to be joyous and bright. Supporting $DOG and the community means supporting wild art installations, loose parties, novel web3 tools, games galore, and heaps of charitable giving. Kabosu gave us so much wow, and we are honored to live in her shadow, celebrating each and every pixel and spreading our furry arms around the earth to give it a lil’ squeeze.
Oh, also we think that memes are going to be a store of value, and the Doge meme is the flagship. We believe her value will eventually be recognized as greater than that of The Mona Lisa. For real. Join the Discord and let our lead meme expert Paco tell you why we won’t stop until we #flipmona.
