Popcat

Know Your Meme traces Pop Cat to Oatmeal, the cat of a user known as XavierBFB. Before October 9, 2020, Xavier shared a photo and an open-mouth edit in a private Discord. A friend called Skettidragon posted an edit based on those images to Reddit that day; partitiongal’s repost on October 10 helped the popping format travel.

That record identifies contributors to the meme, not a coin venture. No reviewed source says Xavier, Skettidragon or partitiongal created, endorsed or licensed the Solana token that later adopted Oatmeal’s face.

The University of Sheffield identifies popcat.click’s creators as Ed, Raina and Freddy. The students released the game on December 11, 2020. Each tap opened Oatmeal’s mouth and added to a country total. By August 2021, the leaderboard had turned a small interaction into a competition among online communities.

The game explains why “popping” already had an audience and a participatory ritual before the coin existed. It does not function as the token’s app: the sources name different builders, and no reviewed agreement ties game clicks, scores or ownership to POPCAT balances.

At 20:42:47 UTC on December 12, 2023, a Solana transaction created the nine-decimal mint and issued one billion POPCAT to a single associated token account. DexScreener dates the principal Raydium POPCAT/SOL pair to 21:04:04, roughly 21 minutes later. The chain identifies the initiating wallet, not a verified person or legal issuer.

This is the token’s actual beginning. It happened more than three years after the meme and about three years after popcat.click, so the familiar image should not be used to merge their authorship. Kraken’s asset statement explicitly says the coin has no connection to the original meme creators.

Young Platform recounts that an operator known as jpeggler paid 35,000 USDC for project control after the original developer threatened to alter metadata. The cited social posts are no longer readily available, and CoinYQ did not review a purchase agreement, so the amount and off-chain terms remain attributed rather than confirmed.

The chain does show metadata activity on December 22 and 23 and a different update-authority key afterward. It now marks the metadata immutable. That evidence supports a handover followed by a lock, but cannot show who owned every social account, liquidity position or token at the time.

The official page says “100% Community Owned,” “Liquidity Pool Burnt,” “Immutable” and “0/0 Tax.” Its own disclaimer also calls POPCAT an entertainment meme coin with no intrinsic value or expected return. These are the community site’s representations; they are not an audited genesis distribution or governance constitution.

The technical facts are narrower. On September 5, 2026, finalized RPC showed 979,935,801.637608264 tokens, with mint and freeze authority both null. The metadata is immutable, although its historical update-authority key remains stored. Those locks reduce two classes of unilateral change. They do not assign copyright in Oatmeal, ownership of popcat.click, website control or enforceable voting rights to token holders.