Popcat began as two frames of a real cat named Oatmeal: one with a closed mouth, one edited so the mouth opens into a perfect O. Posted in October 2020, the edit spread from a private Discord server to Reddit and Twitter within a week, then became popcat.click, a browser clicker that pitted entire countries against each other in 2021. Three years later that recognition was borrowed by Popcat (POPCAT), the Solana memecoin that reached a $2 billion valuation in 2024.
Few memecoins have an origin this well documented. Knowing it explains why POPCAT found an audience so quickly, and why that audience looked different from most crypto crowds.
A Cat Chirping at a Bug
The source video was ordinary. Oatmeal's owner, who posts online as Xavier, shared a short clip of the cat chirping at an insect with friends on Discord. One friend froze a frame and stretched the mouth into an exaggerated circle, and another paired it with the closed-mouth original so the two could be flicked back and forth.
On 9 October 2020 a friend of Xavier's posted the edit to the subreddit r/MEOW_IRL, where it drew modest attention. The next day a Twitter repost of the two images alongside the edit crossed 1.6 million views and more than 160,000 likes, according to the Know Your Meme entry on Pop Cat. Within days people were syncing the popping mouth to music, and Instagram and TikTok users nicknamed it the "wide-mouth singing cat."
The format worked because it needed no language. A cat opening its mouth on the beat reads the same in Bangkok, Taipei or Ohio, a trait that later mattered for the token.
From Meme to Global Scoreboard
The joke became a competition on 11 December 2020, when three University of Sheffield students launched popcat.click. The concept was minimal: every click or tap pops the cat's mouth and adds one point to your country's total on a live global leaderboard. The Wikipedia article on Popcat records the game tracking more than 230 nations by 2023.
The summer of 2021
Popcat.click hit its peak in August 2021. Players in Taiwan pushed their country to the top of the board, helped by national enthusiasm around the Tokyo Olympics, and Thailand answered with a surge that took first place. Malaysia and dozens of other countries joined the race, and people left auto-clickers running overnight to defend their country's rank. Google later named Popcat among the top trending games of 2021.
Popcat goes political
The clicker was cheap to clone, and activists in Southeast Asia used that. Thai protesters built a parody that tapped a politician's face instead of the cat, and Malaysian users made similar versions. The cat had become a shared template for play and protest across the region.
By the time crypto arrived, Popcat was one of the few internet memes with real name recognition in Southeast Asia and a mainstream audience that had never touched a token.
How the Meme Became a Solana Memecoin
POPCAT launched anonymously on Raydium in December 2023, during the first wave of the Solana memecoin revival. Nobody connected to Oatmeal or the popcat.click creators was involved, and no licensing arrangement with them has ever been announced. It is a community coin that borrowed a character, as Dogecoin borrowed a Shiba Inu photo and PEPE borrowed a comic frog.
The borrowed history did three things for the token:
- Instant recognition. New buyers already knew the image, which lowered the cost of attracting attention.
- A regional base. Trading interest in Thailand, Taiwan and Malaysia gave POPCAT a following outside the usual crypto hubs, and a 2026 listing on a Thai exchange tapped it directly.
- A cat to set against the dogs. POPCAT became the flagship of "cat season" in 2024, the rotation from dog tokens into feline ones covered in our look at cat vs dog memecoins.
Recognition did not protect the price, though. Once the 2024 cycle ended, POPCAT fell more than 97% from its high, a path mapped out in our POPCAT price prediction. A famous meme attracts buyers, but keeping them after the market turns takes staying power the image alone cannot supply.
Borrowed Fame and Its Limits
Using someone else's viral image carries a quiet risk. Tokens built on borrowed characters have no rights to the artwork, and the meme's owner can object to commercial use at any time. That contrasts with projects like Cat in a Dogs World, which commissioned original art and owns its character outright.
POPCAT's design choices partly compensate. With a fixed supply and burned liquidity, as detailed in our breakdown of POPCAT tokenomics, there is no company or treasury for anyone to pursue. The token exists regardless of what happens to the meme, and the meme exists regardless of what happens to the token.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Popcat a real cat?
Popcat is a real cat named Oatmeal, and the open-mouth version is a photo edit of a frame from a 2020 video. The closed-mouth image is an unedited photo. Oatmeal's owner shared the clip with friends, who created the meme.
Who made popcat.click?
Popcat.click was built by three University of Sheffield students and launched on 11 December 2020. The game lets anyone tap the cat to add points to their country's global total. It has no connection to the POPCAT token.
Is the POPCAT coin official?
POPCAT is an unofficial community token with no endorsement from the cat's owner or the popcat.click creators. It was launched anonymously on Solana in December 2023. Its value comes entirely from market demand for the meme.
The Pop That Crossed Borders
Popcat's route from a Discord joke to a global clicker contest to a billion-dollar token shows how memecoins really gather value: they rent attention that already exists. POPCAT rented one of the most international memes of the decade, which is why it outlasted thousands of launches from the same period and why its community looks unusually global.
Whether that recognition turns into another rally depends on the wider meme market. You can hold POPCAT on the LeveX spot market or take a directional view with POPCAT perpetual futures, and more origin stories and token primers are collected in Crypto in a Minute.