The Internet’s just evolving
into something much bigger than what we know now.
-Non-Fungible Tokens. -NFT sales hitting $340 million.
The art world just turned upside down.
With us exclusively now is Nyan Cat creator, Chris Torres.
My name is Chris Torres, I’m 35 years old,
and my flying cat meme sold for over half a million dollars.
I think for many of my viewers they’re still going
“NFT what?”
NFTs are non-fungible tokens,
so non-fungible means non-replaceable.
And at the end of day, that means that it's a one of a kind piece
and it can’t be replaced, it can be forged.
It will always be tied back to me.
Somebody could go out there and create a replica of it,
but, at the end of the day, it’s all traceable.
NFTs tie the creator to the artwork,
it’s a great way to empower an artist.
If you wanted to you could just, like, spend cash on
a physical piece of artwork.
But at the end of the day, you don't know if it's real.
You don’t know where it’s from, where it’s been.
It’s subject to damage, it’s subject to being lost,
it’s subject to not being seen by as many people.
So in this case, with the Nyan Cat NFT,
it’s a digital piece, everybody can see it.
It’s not just something that somebody owns
on their phone. It’s in a network.
If you are making an NFT, if you’re brand new to the space,
you mint your piece and then you list it.
And then from there, it's up to
the Internet to decide if they want it or not
and how much they want it for.
So yeah this is exciting. I didn’t think it would get this huge,
but I’m really happy to see how crazy everything has gotten.
When I originally listed my Nyan Cat NFT,
it got a few bids right away
and that started the auction.
I got my good luck cat here. Had a few bids right away
Then there was nothing. And then I was like, “what’s going on?”
Looks like we got 20 minutes left.
But then on the last hour, that's when it really picked up.
-That’s already... fantastic. -Wow
The energy in that chat room was just like insane.
It was just like so much positive energy.
Going twice...
-Going twice. -History
-Yes! -Wow!
Sold! Yeah!
I had no idea what to even say.
I didn't want to, like, just be like screaming the whole time,
but I was like trying to be professional.
It sold for, what was 300 Ethereum
which, at the time, ended up being about
$560,000 worth of cryptocurrency.
However, it's been a few months since that's happened.
300 Ethereum is now worth over a million dollars
and the piece itself, the Nyan Cat NFT itself is also
worth a million dollars.
It’s always going to go up and down.
And you never really know at the end of the day
how it’s going to go.
I personally view it as kind of like my retirement fund,
I’m living the same life, mostly, that I have been.
But like now I'm just making art as a living,
which is kind of what I've always wanted to do.
I've been on the Internet since the mid 90s
and I’ve always been just gravitating towards memes.
I love to draw. I love cats. I love just the Internet in general.
I feel like I've lived on the Internet for most of my life,
I actually started with six figure comics called LOL Comics,
and then Nyan Cat eventually ended up being a part of that world.
But I didn't really think that my art,
that Nyan Cat would actually be something.
A at flying in space in a popart. Yeah.
When I originally posted Nyan cat
I had no idea what it would just turn into.
It's just supposed to be like a profile photo for myself.
You know, I went to sleep
and it just became this huge overnight crazy phenomenon.
So when I woke up, I was getting hundreds of emails right away with
people just like telling me how much they love the work,
asking me how I made it, it was the whole world looking at it.
I created several versions of Nyan Cat.
I recently made Nyan Dogecoin
as a gift to the Dogecoin community.
And I think that's really cool how it's evolving.
There's a lot of like VR projects that are actually making 3D
galleries where you can walk around
and see how people display their artwork.
And it’s like game changing.
Memes are eternal.
Memes are always going to be there and they’re never going to go away.
We’ve got these old school memes
that are just resurging back on the Internet now.
There’s value in that, you know, they become household names.
I feel like we’re just we’re still only getting started with NFTs.
And memes in general, it’s just-
the Internet is just taking over the real world.
And it’s really fascinating to see how that’s all
going to work out from here.