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That Pakistani meme which shook the world.
A retrospect of how one humorous meme got sold for a hefty price, how NFTs work, what artists can expect in Web 3.0?
On August of 1st, Muhammad Asif Raza went live on Facebook, as he sat with both new best friend Salman Ahmad Naqsh and ex-friend Mudassir Ismail Ahmad, huddled side by side on a couch as the meme they created back in 2015 got auctioned and sold for 20 ETH. Converting the amount into dollars makes it equivalent to $49,000 or PKR 7,898,800. Gratitude was in the air as the three actual friends expressed their love to supporters of the meme watching the live stream.
The “friendship ended with Mudassir” meme is embedded as part of modern Pakistani internet culture and for all the unusual reasons. The quirkiness of the message typed in WordArt and green colored cross on the friend, a symbol marking an end of a friendship. A perfectly imperfect MS-Paint job generated seismic-level buzz that broke the internet.
The meme went viral first in the global south and as it reached western shores, it became a worldwide sensation. Considering the appeal of memes within Gen-Z and Millennial circles, mixed with their relatively higher buying power, it only made sense to put up the most popular meme to come out of Pakistan as an NFT.
For the uninitiated, an NFT stands for Non-fungible tokens. Here ‘non-fungible’ means unique or one-of-a-kind. Imagine trading a rare Pikachu Pokemon card for a Wasim Akram collectible card from back in the day, is a non-fungible transaction since both cards are different and vary in value. A fungible transaction would be if one currency is used interchangeably to get a good of equivalent value. What makes NFTs unique is that tokens are assigned an internet address; that is never used more than once.
An art piece is ‘minted’ when the creator uploads the content after paying a processing fee to the marketplace. It’s like buying a plot of land, but think digital. If you ask what artifacts could be defined as an NFT, it could be a number of things and as I list them, they progressively…
