Almost six years back Asif Raza Rana made what seemed like a Facebook post. The post was about friendship and break up and had an accompanying image which had this scribbled on it, “Friendship ended with Mudasir. Now Salman is my best friend.”
It didn’t take a long time for the post to get viral and became meme material across the world. Why are we talking about a six-year-old viral Facebook post now? Because, according to a report by Vice News, “the meme was auctioned off as one of Pakistan’s first meme NFT (non-fungible token) for $51,530 or 20 ethereum.The amount roughly converts into Rs 38 lakh.
The report says that the sale was conducted on Foundation, a digital art market place by Alter, a London- and Lahore-based startup.
What is an NFT?
In case you are wondering what a non-fungible token or NFT is then here’s a short explainer.An NFT is kind of a digital asset that represents objects like art, music, videos, among others. NFTs are generally bought with cryptocurrency and are encoded with a similar software that common cryptos have. A report by Forbes suggests that $174 million have been spent on NFTs in the last four years. NFTs first came into existence in 2014 but its only recently they have become really popular.
As for the viral friendship break up meme, the Vice News report suggests that Raza and his friends will keep a big chunk of the auction earnings. Alter and Foundation will also get a part of the earnings. “I would never have known that [the post] would go so viral and that it would spread all over the world. So many news agencies interviewed us. We’ve even had a cartoon made about us,” Raza was quoted as saying by Vice News. Raza, as per the report, has plans to create similar memes. And in case you were wondering what really happened between Mudasir and Raza then they reconciled and very much close friends.
timesofindia.indiatimes.com
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