How Nyan Cat Creator Finally Let Memers Get Paid
Meme culture is one of the internet’s most beloved and valuable pastimes. And for good reason—memes can be a deceptively rich form of social commentary that manifests itself in tightly looped GIFs or evocative but simple images with blocky text overlays.
But they can also just be good, silly fun.
For the longest time, memes were a major cultural yardstick for dispossession of their creators on the internet. The difference between the heights of global popularity that viral sensations have reached and the lack of compensation (or even basic recognition) their creators received is enormous. It’s enough to cause a massive case of cultural and ethical vertigo.
But this is not a colossal surprise. On the internet, it’s easy to forget that content doesn’t just manifest from the digital ether – it comes from real people. This perceived anonymity makes us more likely to feel like we somehow own it, and more likely to share and use the content we stumble upon as we see fit.
This cognitive difference between origin and value is why internet memes are suitable candidates for the use of NFTs. Blockchain technology has undeniably changed the game for culture creators in recent years. In fact, NFTs have helped meme creators get the recognition and financial compensation they deserve for changing the global internet landscape with their work. And we love to see it.
But few people embody this iconic use case more than Chris Torres, the 36-year-old Dallas-based digital artist behind Nyan Cat, arguably one of the most famous internet memes of all time.
Nyan Cat origin
On April 2, 2011, while brainstorming ideas for a charity drawing he was doing for the American Red Cross, Torres drew an image of a cat with a pastry body surrounded by a group of colored lines. Using the drawing as the blueprint for the Nyan Cat GIF, Torres completed the design and a few days later posted it to his Twitter and Tumblr accounts.
“It was overwhelming at first,” Torres said of the reaction he woke up to the next day, in an interview with nft now. “Wake up to 100 emails from people asking me what was going on. I had never experienced anything like this before. It was the internet’s childhood of creating memes.”
Within days, Nyan Cat was everywhere. A music video set to the tune of a song by the artist daniwell recorded over the internet, which instantly sticks in the memory of netizens from the early 2010s.
It didn’t take long before individuals and even large companies started using Nyan Cat for their own gain. Game developer isTom Games came out with a release called Nyan Cat: Lost In Space shortly after the meme’s birth. Even Warner Brothers used the meme without permission in a number of games released on the Nintendo DS. Torres sued them, and the parties agreed to let Warner Brothers continue to use Nyan Cat while compensating Torres for doing so.
“Several companies have used my artwork [without permission]”, Torres explained. “And it’s funny, all this time Nyan Cat has kind of been free on the internet, everybody has been able to use it. But as an artist, before NFTs, I never saw a dime for it. There were others who used it while I was unemployed. In comes NFTs and now I finally have a way to get proper compensation for my artwork. It’s been a crazy ride.”
Torres first jumped on the crypto wave by buying some Dogecoin in 2013, followed by Ethereum and then Bitcoin. Then a close friend introduced him to NFTs by showing him an article about various NFT marketplaces such as SuperRare and Foundation.
Not fully understanding how NFTs worked and believing the technology to be too good to be true, Torres remastered the original GIF pixel by pixel and put the Nyan Cat NFT up for auction on the Foundation on February 11, 2021.
“I thought I’d give it a try,” Torres said. “I was expecting maybe five or ten Ethereum at the time, but as the auction went on, I had a lot of people tell me that Nyan Cat was kind of the unofficial mascot of Ethereum, and I didn’t really know that. The last hour was just a giant bidding war and it landed at exactly 300 ETH.”
At the time, 300 ETH was worth almost $600,000.
Building the meme economy
Torres says the sale changed both his life and his memes forever, opening a door for creators like himself to join the Web3 community.
“With the NFT boom, I’ve finally been able to get proper credit for being an artist,” Torres said. “And it really started the meme revolution. I called it the meme economy back then, and I still believe in it. Nyan Cat has been an amazing beacon in a way. Its success brought so many people into the space, including other meme people from my time , many OG meme creators.”
Torres explains how, immediately after selling the Nyan Cat NFT, other meme creators started contacting him, curious about the process of setting up to sell their memes as NFTs.
“It’s so surreal to be able to help so many people in this way,” he said. “But that’s the power of Web3 and NFTs, being able to help other people and show that this person actually created this piece. I haven’t turned back since. Ever since I’ve joined NFTs, it feels like the best community to be in.”
Torres has helped some of the creators of the most famous memes of all time onboard Web3: Grumpy Cat, Keyboard Cat, Troll Face, Disaster Girl and others. In April 2022, he helped bring The Coffin Dance NFT to the Foundation, whose auction landed at 327 ETH, more than $1,000,000 at the time. 25 percent of the proceeds from the sale went to the Ukrainian charity Come Back Alive, which supports Ukrainian armed forces as they resist the Russian invasion.
“It’s just so great to know that your creations are helping not only meme creators, but people all over the world,” Torres said of the philanthropic potential of NFTs.
Nyan Dogg and the future of NFT memes
Torres has been busy since the sale of Nyan Cat, exploring the possibilities offered by Web3.
In April 2021, he partnered with BeetsDAO and Snoop Dogg to release the Nyan Dogg Collection on OpenSea, featuring 131 issues of a 4/20-friendly Hazy Nyan Cat and 81 issues of a rainbow-emitting Nyan Blunt.
“The collaboration with Nyan Dogg was in a way [quintessential] Web3 experience,” Torres recalled. “I was contacted by BeetsDAO, saying they would love to work with me and that they had an amazing guest who would like to do something with you. It was almost 4/20 at the time. I was already making a hazy Nyan Cat and they said, well, we’ve got the perfect match for you, so here’s Snoop Dogg. It was a surreal experience and it also increased my presence in the room. People already knew about [Nyan Cat] sales, but now I did collaborations with big artists. We are still in contact. It’s been pretty amazing.”
Looking to the future, Torres is working on creating a collection of fractionalized NFTs for Nyan Cat as he wants the meme to be more accessible. He is also brainstorming ways to connect tools to the NFTs he creates, launching collaborations with metaverses such as Worldwide Web, Turf.NFTand Decentraland.
Torres also started the NFT collection GI Toadz just a few months ago, a project that began when CrypToadz’s creator Gremplin sent him a folder of deleted NFTs that didn’t quite make it into the official collection. Torres and Gremplin built on top of these models to create the new superhero-inspired Toadz drop.
Looking to experiment further in the Web3 space, Torres also plans to release an NFT collection for photography.
“Just a small, limited collection,” Torres said. “I post a lot of pictures of my cats all the time, so I want to have fun with it. Right now I’m brainstorming. I’m just trying to expand into other genres of NFT.”
For Torres and others, NFTs have opened up a new vector of exploration and creative possibilities. Although it was indeed a long time coming, the story of how meme creators and NFTs have found a home in each other is one of the best examples of why the Web3 era is not only important for intellectual property, but inevitable.
