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The artist posted a 54-second clip of his cat Fatso playing the piano online 17 years ago. Since then, the video has become enshrined in internet culture, netting 77 million YouTube views and inspiring meme coins on Solana and Coinbase's Ethereum layer-2 network Base.
There used to be a sense of confrontation between the two communities, but the claws are no longer out, according to Schmidt’s official “meme manager” Ben Lashes. A former professional musician, Lashes brought on Schmidt as his first client in 2009.
Lashes told Decrypt that the two groups are amicable now, purring along with their respective visions for Keyboard Cat’s legacy.
“They’re on two different chains and they have two different communities,” Lashes said. “But they both are doing this organically—for the love of silly meme coins—and an internet meme that is the Godfather of all cat memes.”
Schmidt originally recorded Fatso in 1984, and she died a few years later. But the artist has raised several Keyboard Cats in Fatso’s image, which now carry the feline star’s mantle. That has led to licensing deals with companies like Microsoft and Wonderful Pistachios, Lashes said.
Prior to the licensing agreement, Schmidt experimented with crypto himself. In a video posted Thursday, he said that he minted Keyboard Cat as an NFT in 2021. Through the crypto’s recent embrace of meme coins, however, Keyboard Cat is back to riffing onchain again.
The Solana-based version of the Keyboard Cat meme coin was launched late last year. But it has a smaller presence on Twitter (aka X) than the iteration launched on Base in March.
The relationship grew feisty for a moment after the community for Keyboard Cat on Base blocked the Solana-dedicated crew on Twitter. “Our friends on Base tried to silence us,” the Twitter account for the Keyboard Cat meme coin on Solana stated in May.
Both projects independently approached Lashes, who also counts Nyan Cat’s creator and Grumpy Cat’s owner as clients. Schmidt and Lashes later found that it was best to move forward with both communities, who gave them “participation in both coins,” Lashes said.
“We’ve got skin in the game,” he said. “About last week is when the ink was dry.”
Similar licensing deals have been reached between owners of viral pets and meme coin boosters before. After a tumultuous feud between the owners of Shark Cat and a Solana-based project, the controversy was remedied by a licensing deal that avoided a court fight.
On Solana, the Keyboard Cat community decided to set aside 20 million KEYCAT tokens for Schmidt as a show of gratitude. At today’s prices, that sum would be valued at around $37,000.
Alongside the deal, Schmidt said that he’s “opening up a massive vault” of Keyboard Cat images and videos that both communities can freely use moving forward. Lashes the situation as similar to “two nations” coming together and settling their differences over a common goal.
“People are so tribal about their chains,” he said. “For me and Charlie, we truly wanted this to be about forming some sort of alliance, where both parties could act independently.”
Edited by Ryan Ozawa.