Like many other meme creators, McCurry has seen this emerging trend, and he wants a taste. Unbelievably, in June an NFT of “Doge”, the image of a shiba inu dog long held to be one of the internet’s most popular memes, sold for £2.8m on the auction site Zora.

In the minds of these collectors, NFTs of these memes and viral videos are akin to cave art, painted across the walls of the web by the flickering firelight of a dial-up modem: the viral video Charlie Bit My Finger sold (the actual bidding was done in the ethereum currency) for the equivalent of £538,000 in May the meme Disaster Girl sold for £350,000 in April, and the meme Overly Attached Girlfriend sold for £289,000, also in April.

Collectors want to “own” the original digital file from which all the memes subsequently sprang: in McCurry’s case, the unedited, uncropped picture of Harambe, direct from his memory card. Since early 2021, wealthy collectors have started buying slices of early internet history: the original versions of the rudimentary viral videos and memes from the early days of the internet. The rock band Kings of Leon have generated more than £1.4m in NFT sales of their music this year alone. Once the files are uploaded and verified by a third party, they acquire a rarefied status, in much the same way as a hard-to-find stamp or unique piece of couture. NFTs can be used to record ownership of just about anything: digital art, music, films, games and pornography. These are unique digital assets that are stored on a blockchain, a decentralised ledger of transactions, the same technology used to buy and sell cryptocurrencies. Then non-fungible tokens (NFTs sometimes pronounced as “niftys”) came along.

Ermahgerd meme creator