Nyan Cat is a pixel-art animation of a gray cat with a cherry Pop-Tart for a body, zooming through a star-filled sky while leaving a bright rainbow trail behind it. The animation loops endlessly, paired with the high-energy Japanese Vocaloid track "Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya!" by daniwellP3. "Nyan" is the Japanese onomatopoeia for a cat's meow, the equivalent of "meow" in English5.

The character's design is deliberately simple: big eyes, a cheerful expression, stubby legs that appear to run mid-flight, and a rectangular pastry torso in pink with sprinkles. That simplicity made Nyan Cat instantly recognizable and easy to remix. The whole package, cute cat plus catchy music plus hypnotic loop, created something weirdly addictive. People would leave the video running just to see how long they could stand it2.

Torres originally called the character "Pop Tart Cat" before the internet collectively decided on Nyan Cat after saraj00n's YouTube upload5. Torres accepted the name change, saying he'd "continue to call it" Pop Tart Cat while being "happy with that choice, too"5.

Nyan Cat was one of the defining viral hits of 2011, ranking fifth among the year's most-viewed YouTube videos5. It won the Webby Award for Meme of the Year in 20125 and drew coverage from CNN, BBC, The New York Times, and basically every internet culture outlet that existed at the time12.

The 2013 Torres-Schmidt lawsuit against Warner Bros. and 5th Cell was one of the first high-profile cases of meme creators successfully enforcing copyright over their viral creations10. The settlement established that meme characters could be treated as intellectual property worth protecting and licensing.

In 2021, the NFT sale of the remastered Nyan Cat for approximately $590,000 was one of the earliest major examples of a classic internet meme being sold as crypto art1. The sale came during the early NFT boom and helped normalize the idea that digital memes could hold real monetary value. Torres noted that NFT platforms let creators "retain their copyright and trademarked work," which he saw as important for artists in the meme space1.

Nyan Cat appeared in the 2021 Sony Pictures film *The Mitchells vs. the Machines*3 and inspired official merchandise collaborations with companies like Youtooz3.

The PBS hack of May 29, 2011 gave Nyan Cat one of its most surreal moments. Hacking group LulzSec defaced the PBS website in retaliation for a Frontline episode about WikiLeaks they considered biased4. The defacement page featured Nyan Cat imagery alongside the header "FREE BRADLEY MANNING" and leaked staff passwords2. LulzSec later clarified they exploited a zero-day vulnerability in MoveableType 4, not SQL injection4.

On June 16, 2011, YouTube rolled out a custom flash player for the Nyan Cat video: a miniature animated Nyan Cat flew across the progress bar trailing a rainbow4. It was a fun Easter egg that lasted barely three weeks before a global player update killed it on July 54. Fans weren't ready to let it go. On June 24, developer InstantElevatorMusic released Nyan Cat Progress Bar, a Windows modification that replaced default progress bars system-wide with a rainbow-trailing cat4. On July 19, Nikos Lykousas released NyanSliders for jailbroken iOS devices, swapping every slider with an animated Nyan Cat8. Years later, when Apple introduced the Touch Bar on MacBook Pros, yet another developer carried the same concept forward2.

Torres' cat Marty, the real Russian Blue behind the meme, died in November 2012 from feline infectious peritonitis5. Torres posted a tribute, and fans responded with an outpouring of support.

In May 2013, Torres teamed up with Keyboard Cat creator Charles Schmidt to sue Warner Bros. and 5th Cell for using both characters without permission in the Scribblenauts video game series10. Torres had registered copyrights and filed trademark applications on Nyan Cat, and said he'd been "disrespected and snubbed" when trying to negotiate licensing5. The case settled in September 2013, with both creators receiving payment and the characters staying in the games under a proper license10.

Nyan Cat won the Webby Award for "Meme of the Year" in 20125. An officially licensed cryptocurrency, Nyancoin, launched in January 2014 with the domain nyanco.in5. Variations like Tac Nayn, a dark-colored version that flies in the opposite direction, kept the meme alive through community creativity11.

The NFT era gave Nyan Cat a second wind. In February 2021, Torres remastered the original GIF for its 10th anniversary, making minor touch-ups like removing a star from the animation1. He minted it as an NFT on the Foundation platform, and a 24-hour auction starting at 3 ETH spiraled into a bidding war that closed at 300 ETH, roughly $590,0001. Torres described the moment on a Twitch livestream with Foundation: "I was trying to keep my composure, but mentally I was screaming at the number"7. He told Nasdaq that he'd "basically opened the door to a whole new meme economy in the crypto world"1.

In November 2023, the original saraj00n YouTube channel took down the Nyan Cat video and posted a call to free Palestine. The channel, which had over 300,000 subscribers, changed its bio to "the meme you seek has been forcibly displaced"2. Torres moved the video to his own channel. In an interview with The Daily Dot, he called Nyan Cat "digital sugar in image form" and said memes "thrive by keeping them on the internet" and "not going too hard on them"2.