A non-fungible token (NFT) of the original photo of the famous Shiba Inu dog, which featured in the legendary Doge meme from 2010, has sold for a record-breaking price of 1,696 ETH ($5.5 million or roughly Rs. 40 crores). In June this year, the owner of the dog, named Kabosu, minted the original photo of the canine as an NFT — a rare and original piece that pays tribute to the whole Dogecoin phenomena. That NFT has now been purchased by PleasrDAO, an experimental art collective. Now, PleasrDAO plans to allow fans to own a piece of the NFT for as little as $1.

The Doge movement has created a massive online community. The Dogecoin, inspired by the Doge movement, is a top cryptocurrency that has billionaire supporters like Elon Musk and Mark Cuban.

The PleasrDAO collective is selling fractional ownership of the NFT, a process of transforming digital artworks into unique verifiable digital assets that are traded on the blockchain, Jamis Johnson, chief pleasing officer of PleasrDAO, wrote in a blogpost.

How does it work?

Using Fractional.art, PleasrDAO has “fractionalised” the NFT into billions of pieces of ERC-20 tokens, the standard for creating and issuing smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain. For Doge NFT, PleasrDAO is calling the tokens DOG. Investors can buy any number of DOG tokens but how many tokens an investor buys will determine their ownership stake in the “Doge” meme NFT. However, PleasrDAO has decided to retain the majority ownership.

Johnson explained the fractionalising Doge meme NFT “very much as if the Louvre decided to fractionalise the Mona Lisa and distribute a portion of it for the public to own. However, unlike at the Louvre, collective ownership of art is really only possible using crypto art.”

The market for NFTs has exploded recently, with OpenSea, the world’s largest NFT marketplace, seeing about $2 billion in transactions in August alone. However, many experts consider NFTs and cryptocurrencies risky and advise investing only what you can afford to lose.