It’s a sad day for NFT meme lovers as popular NFT influencer Sartoshi offers the NFT space an enduring “gn” with the End by sartoshi. Instead of justifying the move, the anonymous figure instead laid out what the future of the mfers NFT collection will be like without her.

However, the NFT community is divided over Sartoshi’s latest move – an open-edition collection created 828 times.621 ETH (currently almost $1.5M) turnover at the time of writing. So was it a meme-maker’s masterpiece, or just a clever carpet move performed in front of everyone?

Who is Sartoshi?

For those who don’t know, sartoshi (@sartoshi_nft) was an anonymous NFT collector and meme artist. As many will note, her alias was a reference to Bitcoin’s mythical creator, Satoshi Nakamoto.

In recent months, Sartoshi has been best known as the creator of the mfers NFT project. From the beginning, the collection shared the NFT space. While some loved it for its portrayal of the meme culture so central to NFTs, others condemned it as an insult to hard-working, “real” artists who didn’t even remotely see the success of mfers.

For illustration, these stick figure PFPs have a current floor price of 1.65 ETH on OpenSea. For the same reason, the collection has amassed a staggering secondary trading volume of 38.7k ETH. That’s almost $69 million (hehe) at today’s prices.

Breaking down the ending of Sartoshi

Earlier today, sartoshi announced her departure from the NFT space through a tweet and an accompanying blog post. Significantly, the post offers no real explanation as to why Sartoshi decided to leave now. Instead, it simply begins with a series of tweets from random Twitter users who predicted that Sartoshi would actually take inspiration from Satoshi Nakamoto by eventually disappearing from space.

In the blog post, sartoshi outlines the steps that will take place to transfer ownership of the mfers smart contract to its community of owners. Basically, Sartoshi transfers ownership of the smart contract to the unofficial mfers multi-sig wallet.

To clarify, after mfers were discontinued in late 2021, a group of mfer holders created an unofficial mfers discord and multi-sig gnosis that is safe to operate as an unofficial project treasury. Now, after staying away from the process to allow the community to dictate its direction, Sartoshi is essentially giving control of the project to these OG Mfer holders.

In addition, sartoshi made changes to the mfers license fees. To explain, there is a 5% royalty on every mfers NFT sale on the secondary market. The new royalty split is as follows:

• 50% off the unofficial Mfers Multi-Sig;
• 25% off Sartoshi’s Creator Royalty Wallet;
• 15% to westcoastnft (mfers main development team – committed to get 15%)
• 10% to other mfers developers/consultants

How does the NFT community react to the end of Sartoshi?

For members of the NFT community who loved what mfers represented, Sartoshi’s move was an act of genius. On the one hand, it mimics the story of Satoshi Nakamoto. On the other hand, it also ensures that the life and future of mfers exist separately from its creator.

However, not everyone responded so generously. On the contrary, many people on Twitter are saying that this marks the completion of Sartoshi’s slow Mfers Rug Pull. This is despite the fact that the project arguably popularized the stance of meme NFT projects having no roadmap or utility whatsoever. Still, some people are big critics of Sartoshi, as evidenced by the above tweet from Hustler (himself a highly controversial influencer).

However, what caused the most anger was the decision to go with the “End of Sartoshi” drop. Open editions are controversial in a vacuum, let alone when it comes to a polarizing character like Sartoshi. The fact that they dropped the collection just before leaving the room rubbed many the wrong way. Not to mention how much the NFTs have already earned.

So what do you think? Was this a true meme masterpiece or just another serial carpet puller exploiting the NFT space? No matter where you fall on the spectrum, one thing is certain: the legend of Sartoshi will long be remembered in the NFT space.