The sale of the DOG tokens representing ownership of the legendary Doge meme non-fungible token (NFT) raked in USD 45m in a recently completed auction. Meanwhile, current DOG token prices on decentralized exchanges values the NFT at USD 500m.
The famous NFT, which was purchased by the digital art collective PleasrDAO for USD 4m in June, was last Wednesday put up for sale again, albeit in tokenized form representing shared ownership of the digital art piece. The sale started off as an auction of 20% of the total token supply, which is now sold out with ETH 11,942 (USD 45.5m) raised from 1,796 buyers.
After the auction, tokens were made available for trading on decentralized exchanges like Sushiswap and Uniswap. And with each token currently (as of 09:33 UTC) changing hands for USD 0.03002, the total value of the tokenized NFT becomes an astonishing USD 503m, per data from fractional.art.
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The Doge NFT to USD Chart
The massive valuation of the NFT means that the implied value of the art piece has risen over 100 times in US dollar terms over the course of just three months – another indication that the NFT market is on fire at the moment.
And while it’s important to note that the NFT itself would not necessarily sell for this amount if it was put up for sale in one piece, the valuation shows that a strong demand for fractionalized NFTs exists in the market. Given that top digital art pieces often sell for millions of dollars, fractionalizing them in the form of freely tradable ERC-20 tokens is another way for ordinary investors to get some exposure to the growing space.
Tokenized with the help of fractional.art, the Doge NFT’s owner, PleasrDAO, has said that 25% of the token supply will be kept as a community fund, while 55% will remain with PleasrDAO “as the main custodians” of the NFT.
“The DAO has no intention to sell this ownership and if that changes it will be communicated ahead of time,” the art collective wrote in a blog post announcing the sale, promising to avoid measures “resulting in downward price pressure.”
The PleasrDAO art collective is made up of several prominent investors in the crypto space, including Tom Schmidt of Dragonfly Capital, Su Zhu of Three Arrows Capital, as well as Andrew Kang and Marc Weinstein of Mechanism Capital, among others.