On April 2, 2011, 25-year-old illustrator Christopher Torres of Dallas, Texas was running a charity drawing livestream for the Red Cross when two viewers made separate requests: one said "cat" and the other said "Pop Tart"5. Torres combined the two ideas into a quick doodle of a cat with a pastry body and rainbow trail, based on his own Russian Blue cat named Marty2. That same evening, he turned the sketch into his first-ever 8-bit animation and posted the GIF to his Twitter, Tumblr, and his webcomic site LOL-Comics7.

Three days later, on April 5, 2011, YouTube user saraj00n (real name Sara June) took Torres' animation and set it to "Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya!," a Vocaloid song by Japanese producer daniwellP5. The track had originally been composed for Hatsune Miku, but the version used in the video was a cover by the UTAU voice Momone Momo, uploaded to Niconico on January 30, 2011 by a user called "Momomomo"5. Saraj00n titled the upload "Nyan Cat," and it hit one million views within two weeks4.

Torres had no grand plans for the GIF. He'd used it as his Twitter avatar and moved on. Then overnight his inbox filled with hundreds of emails and the view counter kept climbing. As he told Trend & Chaos in 2021: "It was born out of pure randomness and love for everything cats, space, and the Internet"7.

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.