Sartoshi is an anonymous artist known for mfers, a hand-drawn collection of 10,000 stick-figure characters released in November 2021. Before launching mfers he had built a following on Twitter for sharing NFT market commentary and memes, including a crypto-themed reworking of the Are Ya Winning, Son? meme. The mfers project had no roadmap and was released under a public domain, CC0 license so that collectors could use the characters freely.
On June 9, 2022 Sartoshi announced he was stepping back from mfers, transferring its management and revenue to the community in the name of decentralization, an ethos he said drew on Bitcoin's pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. Around his exit he released a final open-edition NFT titled End of Sartoshi, which sold more than 16,000 copies for a combined total of nearly 1,000 ETH. Many collectors accused him of a rug pull, though others defended the move as consistent with the principles he had stated from the start. The average price of an mfer fell from 2.2 ETH in May 2022 to 1.5 ETH the following month as the community absorbed his departure. Sartoshi returned to the project about six months later, receiving a largely warm welcome, and resumed a prominent position as a commentator in the NFT space.
