But that wasn't what got Nyan Cat going as an NFT, Torres said. Torres had initially set the floor price at 3 ETH.īy the time Torres entered the market, lots of people already knew Nyan Cat as a GIF or meme. That was equivalent to about $690,000, based on ETH's trading price of about $2,300 on Monday. The first and original Nyan Cat sold for 300 ETH in February 2021 after an unexpected bidding war took place. The artworks listed on Foundation were uploaded as MP4 files, while the main collection remained GIFs. Torres took the old files he had of Nyan Cat and remastered them in HD quality but didn't change the pixelated feature. While he was waiting, Foundation, another NFT marketplace, contacted him. SuperRare was the first NFT marketplace he applied to in January 2021, but it took the platform several months to accept him. "So we were in a very stressful situation, but then the NFTs came along and just totally saved our lives." "I was literally living on unemployment and we had just bought a house and I was furloughed months before," Torres said. He had a day job in IT, until he got laid off in April 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, he said. Torres has always been an artist but never made enough from his artwork alone to pay the bills. And you know, they make a lot of money out of it, to be frank."
Then that would be my payment for them to use my work commercially. He continued, "It was basically me versus the world in terms that I had people and companies approach me and they would just try to offer free publicity or they would say they would tweet about it or just post it somewhere.
"I was making art all the time, but I wasn't getting the recognition that I am getting today," Torres said. At first the idea that artists could get recognition and a decent amount of financial compensation for their work seemed too good to be true, he said. Then he learned about non-fungible tokens through a friend who sent him a link to an article about SuperRare, an NFT marketplace. Torres has made many iterations of Nyan Cat over the years but didn't do much with them. But it challenged him to preserve the traditional pixelated look. To create Nyan Cat, Torres used Adobe Fireworks, a now-discontinued program similar to Flash that he said crashed constantly. To date, that video has raked in almost 200 million views. Torres told Insider he didn't know who had created it at the time, though today he works with that creator.
A few days later, someone made a YouTube video of Nyan Cat with music in the background. He first posted the GIF on Twitter and Tumbler in April 2011. Torres, a big fan of retro video games, said the image's pixelated feature was inspired by Nintendo's graphics. This story is available exclusively to InsiderĪnd start reading now. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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