Chris Torres is a Puerto Rican-born,Dallas-baseddigital artist who created Nyan Cat, an 8-bit animation of a Pop-Tart-bodied cat trailing a rainbow, based on his own Russian Blue cat named Marty.He drew the character on April 2, 2011, while developing a charity piece for the American Red Cross, and within days it had spread across the internet in fan-made music videos and mobile games.
Torres remastered the original GIF pixel by pixel and put it up for auction on the NFT platform Foundation, where it sold in February 2021 for 300 ETH, worth roughly $600,000 at the time.,,Before the sale, companies including Warner Bros. had used Nyan Cat in commercial products without his permission, and Torres has said NFTs gave him a way to be compensated as the work's creator for the first time.
Following the sale, Torres began helping other meme creators mint and sell their own work as NFTs.,He helped Carlos Ramirez, the creator of the Trollface meme, sell it as an NFT for 42 ETH, about $69,000 at the time.In April 2022, he helped bring the Coffin Dance video to Foundation as an NFT that sold for 327 ETH, with 25 percent of the proceeds going to the Ukrainian charity Come Back Alive.
In April 2021, Torres collaborated with BeetsDAO and the musician Snoop Dogg on Nyan Dogg, an OpenSea collection of 131 Hazy Nyan Cat editions and 81 Nyan Blunt editions.He also released the NFT collection G.I. Toadz with help from CrypToadz creator Gremplin, and in 2023 launched a Nyan Cat collection with Reddit that drew enough demand to temporarily take the platform offline.,
