Crypto Art Continues To Trend As ‘Deal With It’ And ‘Bad Luck Brian’ Get In On Meme NFTs

In recent weeks, the crypto art world has been seeing some massive attention and unprecedented moments. From the sale of Chris Torres’ Nyan Cat NFT at $600,000 to Beeple’s ongoing auction at Christie’s, NFTs are shaping up to be the hottest digital commodity of the year.

During our recent interview with Torres about the sale of his NFT, he told us that he thought the auction would “open up the floodgates” for other meme creators to get into crypto art, and it seems he was right. Earlier this week, Kyle Craven, better known as Bad Luck Brian, joined Foundation and is slated to auction off his very own NFT in the near future.

Yesterday, digital artist Ryder Ripps joined the fray after minting his Deal With It NFT featuring the iconic meme sunglasses that have been used in a number of memes for over a decade. Currently in the last leg of its 24-hour auction, the artwork is up to 5 ETH, or just shy of $8,000.

According to Ripps, who created the “Deal With It” meme in 2010, the sale includes “the full rights to this image and meme and the Photoshop template used to create it.”

For a bit of history on the meme, it was created in the summer of 2010 when animated GIFs with dropping sunglasses were popularized on the media-sharing site Dump.fm, which promoted a "deal with it" GIF contest in May that year.

Ripps, who founded Dump.fm, said the Something Awful dog was the inspiration for the GIF series in an interview with Know Your Meme.

“That Something Awful Duck Hunt dog had been around for a while and myself and jertronic and some others started making our own versions of it to be funny, and then it just sort of took off,” Ripps said. “I put the Photoshop template I made online and people were making them with that I think.”

Ripps’ NFT has about six hours left to go in the auction, joining a slew of other meme-related crypto art that’s spiked since February. In addition to Deal With It, Torres is also currently auctioning a Dogecoin version of Nyan Cat, which is also ending today and has already climbed up to nearly $55,000.

As the space for crypto art continues to grow with each passing day, we can expect more and more meme creators to get in on the hype as the art world evolves into a new stage of the digital era.