For the celebration of its 10th anniversary, the creator of Nyan Cat, Chris Torres decided to sell a digital asset known as an NFT, a non-fungible token, at auction. The sale was hosted by the new NFT marketplace Foundation. The asset fetched a price of 300ETH, that’s for the blockchain called Ethereum— which is equivalent to $561,000 USD.
The price of the asset skyrocketed during the final 30 minutes of the auction from 15ETH ($18000). The bid for the digital asset started from 3ETH ($5000). “It was crazy,” the artist, Chris Torres, told. “At first the auction was going very slow, so I didn’t think it’d get that many bids, but there was a wild bidding war near the end. Part of me was thinking, this can’t be real. There’s no way.”
Nyan Cat is a pixelated gray cat which takes one to 1980s video games like Pac-man and Atari. It flies in a straight line through an equally dated-looking starry night backdrop, leaving a stream of colorful rainbow behind. The three-minute-plus video uploaded to YouTube in 2011 became very popular and there are lots of memes on it including a a 10-hour video of Nyan Cat on repeat, and one featuring 50 different cat memes that all riff on the original cat.
Torres has created a remastered version of the original Nyan Cat for its 10th anniversary. The original Nyan cat has been modified. For instance, the star that came up randomly in the original 12-frame animation was removed from the remastered version as it irritated the artist.
As the bidding neared its end, Torres and a representative for Foundation watched the action on a Twitch video, which was shared to Twitter. Foundation has launched an NFT marketplace earlier this month and hit $1 million in sales within its first two weeks. On this artist can set a reserve price and once it’s met, it triggers a 24-hour auction. If there is a bid in the last 15 minutes of the auction, then the auction extends for another 15 minutes. At the Nyan Cat auction, there were 29 bids placed and the majority of those happened within the final hour, so the sale kept getting extended.