In September 2015, Pakistani government worker Muhammad Asif Raza made an earth-shattering announcement on Facebook: “Friendship ended with Mudasir. Now Salman is my best friend.” The news quickly went viral, becoming one of the most recognizable memes on the Internet.
Almost six years later, Raza has managed to book an immense profit from his slapdash meme by auctioning it off as a non-fungible token on NFT marketplace Foundation.
Proud to announce that I am now best friends with Muhammad https://t.co/fv4m7DnZJc pic.twitter.com/XupSkBxtvl
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ᕙ༼ຈل͜ຈ༽ᕗ
The NFT sold this evening for 20 ETH ($52,174) to Andrew Kang, co-founder of crypto investment firm Mechanism Capital.
Kang told Decrypt that he bought the NFT because memes like these “represent important pockets of internet culture and history.”
“The Mudasir meme can probably be recognized by at least tens of millions of people and is also just legitimately funny to me, having repurposed it myself in the past,” he said. Kang also owns three other memes: Harambe, Dust Storm Dog, and Suh Dude.
Matt Condon, another bidder who has used the meme on Twitter, told Decrypt, “like all good memes, it captures a feeling, a pattern of human thought, and gives that pattern a legible form.”
“This meme captures that precise feeling of ‘wow, I was really into A and now because of a change of heart I’ve forsaken A and gone all the way into B.’”
To boost the price of the auction, Raza didn’t shy away from pitting the bidders against each other, announcing a change in his BFF status each time someone placed the highest bid.
@Rewkang is now my best friend, he is the leading bidder at 20.00 ETH
— Muhammad Asif Raza (@wikileaks786) August 1, 2021
And in a video appeal this morning, Raza expressed his disappointment at the then-highest bid of 3.69 ETH ($9,400). “I love all of you. You love me too. I request all of you—you have to put big bids on my NFT auction. Thank you very much,” he said.
Video for my NFT Auction ….@withFND pic.twitter.com/Ff7QBKnOdl
— Muhammad Asif Raza (@wikileaks786) August 1, 2021
Raza created the meme to throw shade on his former friend. He told Vice in 2016, “Mudasir was my friend for longer than five years before [the meme], but he became very selfish, arrogant, and proud. He was not giving me time.”
Memes as NFTs
Raza joins a long list of meme creators who sold their tokens as NFTs this year.
Other iconic Internet memes that sold as NFTs include Nyan Cat NFT, which fetched $580,000 in February, Keyboard Cat, which sold for $69,000 in March, and Scumbag Steve, which sold for $62,000 in March.
The Mudasir auction coincided with a trading frenzy for the most valuable NFT project, the computer-generated avatar collection CryptoPunks. Some analysts claim the upsurge in activity rippled through the NFT market, which has died down after peaking in the spring.