Move over Nyan Cat. Over the weekend, news broke that the iconic Doge meme NFT has been sold for a record US$4milion, bought to the tune of 1,696.9 ETH.

Doge, the meme featuring a know-it-all looking Shiba Inu that many on the Internet consider as the most iconic, was bought by auction winner @pleasrdao on auction site Zora. The meme was first put up for auction on Tuesday by Atsuko Sato, the owner of Kabosu, the dog from the image. It ran for roughly three days, set in motion a bidding war between @twodollahotdoge and @pleasrdao before the latter prevailed as the eventual winning bidder.

The term Doge came from a 2005 episode in the Flash cartoon ‘Homestar Runner’ where the titular character Homestar calls another character his D-O-G-E. In 2010, Sato posted the image of her Shiba Inu to her personal blog, from where it took a life of its own and spawned countless memes on sites like Tumblr and Reddit. A user on Reddit referred to the image as Doge and its name stuck.

The meme saw the start of “Doge speak” where Kabosu’s image, with a smug smile on her face giving someone a slight side eye and paws crossed, is used alongside strings of broken English like “Wow. Much scare. Very bork” in place of clearly written and spelled out sarcasm. Its simplicity quickly got everyone referencing in many duh moments, emulating its simplistic speak, written in laughable Comic Sans font, no less.

It’s so popular, it has once won the Internet meme database Know Your Meme’s ‘Meme of the Decade’ Award in 2019. Its popularity recently surged again thanks to Dogecoin, the cryptocurrency branded and named after it.

“We’re so happy to be a part of this milestone in internet history. If any meme deserved to be the new meme NFT record holder, it’s Doge,” said Don Caldwell, editor-in-chief of Know Your Meme. Know Your Meme was also responsible for verifying that Sato was the rightful owner of the NFT prior to the sale.

A portion of the proceeds from the NFT sale will go to several charities like the Japanese Red Cross Society and World Food Programme.

(Image: Know Your Meme)