On June 11, 2021, Atsuko Sato – the woman who owned Kabosu, the Shiba Inu from the original Doge meme – auctioned the Doge NFT she minted at the advice of Aya Miyaguchi, then Executive Director of the Ethereum Foundation and now its President. The image sold to PleasrDAO for 1,696.9 ETH, about $4.2 million at the time, making it the highest meme NFT auction ever.

PleasrDAO then fractionalized the NFT into 16,969,696,969 tokens named $DOG, leading to the birth of Own The Doge (OTD) in September 2021. While PleasrDAO remains OTD’s parent DAO, the project operates independently and is officially backed by the original Doge meme, endorsed by Atsuko Sato and Kabosu herself.

Legendary trader GCR – who famously ran a five-figure sum into nine figures, shorted LUNA before its collapse, and made high-stakes bets on political futures like Trump’s reelection – called not buying the original Kabosu NFT “one of his biggest financial regrets” and “the most valuable asset in crypto.” 

His conviction was so strong that he later bought the original Dogwifhat meme for 1,210 ETH, about $4 million.

Yet despite this incredible lore, the two biggest provenance projects in crypto – Own The Doge ($DOG) and Bureau of Internet Culture or BIC DAO ($NFD) – remain largely overlooked and underloved. In an age of AI-generated spam and endless token deployments, it’s surprising that assets with real provenance, IP backing, and cultural legitimacy don’t command more premium valuations from the market.

Provenance vs. IP: Ownership You Can Prove vs. Ownership You Can Enforce

In crypto, the terms provenance and intellectual property (IP) are often used interchangeably. But they operate on fundamentally different rails — one social and onchain, the other legal and offchain.

Provenance refers to the origin and chain of custody of a digital artifact — who created it, when it was minted, and how it’s been transferred. It’s cryptographical