POPCAT
 | |
| ticker | POPCAT |
|---|---|
| blockchain | Solana |
| launched | December 2023 |
| peak market cap | about 2 billion dollars (November 2024) |
POPCAT is a Solana meme coin based on the 2020 Popcat internet meme, and it became the first cat coin to reach a one billion dollar market capitalization.
POPCAT is a meme coin on the Solana blockchain based on the Popcat meme, an image pair of a cat named Oatmeal with its mouth closed and then popped open into a wide "O" shape. Launched in December 2023, it led the cat coin counterwave to Solana's dog dominated meme scene.
Origin
The Popcat meme originated in October 2020, when images of Oatmeal, a domestic short haired cat whose owner posts as @XavierBFB on X, were edited into a mouth popping animation that spread through gaming and meme communities. The clicking game popcat.click, built separately from the coin, launched December 11, 2020, by three University of Sheffield students, Freddy Heppell, Joshua O'Sullivan and Edward Hails. The site went viral across Asia in August 2021, with Taiwan's national click count jumping from about 150 million to over 2.5 billion pops between August 8 and 11 as Taiwan, Thailand and Malaysia raced each other on the leaderboard, the cultural substrate the 2023 token later financialized. The token itself launched anonymously on Solana in December 2023 with a supply of roughly 980 million, riding the same wave of image based coins that produced dogwifhat. It carried no utility and marketed itself purely on the meme's recognizability.
Community takeover
The token's early history nearly ended in a rug. The original anonymous POPCAT developer reportedly threatened to deface the token's metadata unless holders funded a 5,000 SOL NFT collection for personal benefit, an attempted extraction from the community. In December 2023 the trader and meme coin figure known as jpeggler bought the update authority from that developer for 35,000 USDC and made the metadata immutable, the move that stabilized the project and let it grow into its 2024 run.
Market history
POPCAT climbed steadily through 2024, outlasting most of its December 2023 cohort. It became the first cat themed meme coin to cross a one billion dollar market capitalization, and printed an all time high of about 2.08 dollars on November 17, 2024, during the post election meme rally, valuing the token at roughly 2 billion dollars. It was subsequently listed on major exchanges and perpetual futures venues. Like the rest of the 2024 class it bled through 2025; by mid 2026 it traded near 0.05 dollars with a market capitalization around 50 million dollars, down about 97 percent from the peak.
Cultural impact
POPCAT's run legitimized the "cat season" narrative in the trenches, opening the door for cat in a dogs world, michi, and dozens of smaller cat coins. Its slow, grinding chart through mid 2024, in contrast to the instant verticals of pump.fun launches, made it a favorite example of a "community coin" that survived multiple drawdowns before its blowoff top. The phrase "pop pop" and the clicking cat remain standard furniture in Solana meme iconography. A trench comparison illustrates the scale of that peak: trader Fktinz ranked Solana meme coin all time highs on July 27, 2026 at WIF 5 billion dollars, BONK 4.5 billion, PNUT 2.2 billion, POPCAT 2 billion and BOME 1.9 billion, against DOGE at 88 billion, Ethereum linked SHIB at 43 billion and PEPE at 11.4 billion, a community estimate rather than an independently verified figure, framing POPCAT's 2 billion dollar peak as roughly the Solana meme ceiling as of that comparison.
References
- Bitget: https://www.bitget.com/academy/what-is-popcat-meme-coin-solana
- CoinGecko: https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/popcat
- tokentax.co: https://tokentax.co/blog/popcat-coin
- Phemex Academy: https://phemex.com/academy/what-is-popcat-token-solana-meme-coin-guide
- flitpay.com: https://www.flitpay.com/blog/popcat-price-prediction
- solsniffer.com: https://solsniffer.com/blog/memecoin/popcat-origin-story-and-guide
- Know Your Meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sites/popcatclick
- X post by @Fktinz: https://x.com/Fktinz/status/2081580618463228408
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