Original 'Bad Luck Brian' Internet Meme Photo Sells For $36,000

The digital art sale took place on marketplace Foundation, which sells non-fungible tokens - more on that later - to the highest bidder in an auction format.

This particular auction took place on March 9, and was won by someone going by the name @a.

Not much of a clue to who that could be, then.

So, non-fungible tokens - NFTs are they're known in the business - are unique tokens that essentially verify that a piece of digital artwork is real and not interchangeable with any other.

It essentially offers the buyer confident that their product is genuine, and is not just a copy of something that any old person could buy up.

Or, at least, that's sort of what it is. It's kinda complicated.

@a will get their digital signature as proof of ownership written into the blockchain data for the original Bad Luck Brian photo, which is - you have to imagine - exactly what they wanted when they paid so much cryptocurrency for it.

The person in the photo is a dude called Kyle - not Brian - who shot to unlikely fame when the yearbook photo that makes up the meme went viral in 2012.

It isn't the only piece of internet history that has been sold as an NFT of late.

Remember Nyan Cat? Well, that original meme recently traded hands for $600,000 (£431,000), and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey is to auction off the first ever tweet for charity.

That tweet, from March 2006, is expected to fetch millions when it is eventually bought. Not bad for a tweet that just says: "Just setting up my twttr"

Currently, the highest bid is around $2.5 million (£1.8 million) so it's only the super-rich who can dream of getting their hands on that particular piece of internet history.

Even real world artists such as Grimes and Kings of Leon are getting on board. It seems as if we can expect to hear more about non-fungible tokens in the future.