Popcat: what it is and how it works

POPCAT: what it is and how the ‘pop’ cat meme coin works

There’s a cat on the internet that opens and closes its mouth funnily, making a sharp, irresistible sound. From that simple image, which later became a video, one of the most talked-about meme coins of recent years was born.

It’s called Popcat, its token is $POPCAT, and its evolution from a simple homemade joke to a financial phenomenon on the blockchain is one of the most absurd—and fascinating—stories in the entire crypto ecosystem. A story made up of global clicks, community uprisings and a climb to the top of the Solana network.

If you’re curious about what Popcat is and why it’s become a web3 icon, this is the article for you.

POPCAT: The meme that took the internet by storm

It all began in October 2020, when a Discord user named XavierBFV posted two photos of his pet cat, Oatmeal. 

The first image shows the cat with its mouth closed; in the second, digital editing exaggerates the opening of the mouth into a perfect ‘O’ shape.

The result? One of the most viral memes of recent years. The content spread across Reddit, Instagram and Twitter at an astonishing speed. Users remixed it by syncing it with music tracks, turning Oatmeal into a sort of feline singer.

Following the meme’s popularity, on 11 December 2020, popcat. Click was launched: a global clicker game in which users click on the cat’s image to boost their country’s ranking, thus transforming a simple meme into an ironic geopolitical competition. 

Currently, years after its launch, the top of the global leaderboard features:

From Discord to Solana: how the Popcat crypto came about

The definitive shift from social media to digital markets occurred in December 2023. At that time, whilst the Solana ecosystem was buzzing with new energy around the memecoin phenomenon, someone recognised the potential to transform Oatmeal into an on-chain asset, launching the $POPCAT token.

The launch took place on Raydium, the leading decentralised exchange by volume on Solana. (If you’d like to learn more about the technology behind this protocol, our guide ‘Raydium: what it is and how it works’ is the perfect resource for you).

The debut marked one of the most successful memecoin launches of that period, but, as in any good story worth its salt, the most critical moment for the $POPCAT ecosystem came at the height of the project’s growth.

The community rebels against the founder

Starting as a simple viral image and evolving into one of the most talked-about meme coins in the Solana ecosystem, the story of $POPCAT risked an abrupt end due to a plot twist worthy of a financial thriller.

Shortly after the launch, the original developer decided to attempt a move bordering on blackmail: he openly threatened to compromise the token’s metadata — that is, its visual identity and technical information recorded on-chain — if the community did not fund his personal NFT collection with a whopping 5,000 SOL, equivalent at the time to around $1.2 million. 

The community’s response was immediate and unanimous. jpeggler, founder of the ENIGMA digital art collection and a $POPCAT holder, stepped forward and, on 22 December 2023, brought the whole affair to light with a tweet that was destined to go down in the community’s history. Rather than giving in to blackmail, jpeggler negotiated directly with the developer and purchased the token’s update rights, along with control of the official social media channels and website, for 35,000 USDC, ousting the founder for good.

Since then, $POPCAT has become a textbook case of a CTO — Community TakeOver: a token with no team, no top-down roadmap, kept alive solely by the determination of its holders. A story that closely mirrors the origins of Dogecoin, born almost by chance and surviving thanks to the strength of a community that believed in it more than its own creator.

Transparent, community-driven tokenomics

It was precisely in the wake of these events that the economic structure (tokenomics) of $POPCAT was fortified to eliminate the risks typical of emerging projects and protect investors from any future manipulation. Here are the pillars that make $POPCAT a transparent and secure asset:

In simple terms, no hidden mechanisms, no fees, no centralised control. $POPCAT is now a project entirely in the hands of its community.

Just a meme, or is there more to it?

The question that naturally arises after understanding in detail what Popcat is and retracing its history is always the same one we ask ourselves when faced with Dogecoin or Shiba Inu: beyond the meme, is there any substance?

The honest answer is: it depends on what you mean by ‘substance’. From a technical standpoint, $POPCAT offers nothing that other tokens do not already have. No DApps, no DeFi ecosystem, no stated practical use case. But anyone who stops there is missing a fundamental part of the equation: the power of a universally recognised meme and a community that has already proven it can defend its project.

As with all meme coins, however, volatility is extreme, and the risk of loss is real. Anyone approaching Popcat crypto must do so with the awareness that it is a highly speculative asset, and that price history teaches us that after every ‘moon’ there can be an equally rapid return to Earth.

Stay informed, understand market dynamics, and never invest more than you are prepared to lose: this applies to Dogecoin, it applies to Shiba Inu, and it applies — naturally — to Oatmeal the cat as well.

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