Bitcat — the first cat on the blockchain

01 — The artifact

Four outputs,
one cat

Bitcoin has no field for pictures. What it does have is a slot in every payment where twenty bytes of address hash belong — and nothing in the protocol checks that those twenty bytes are really an address.

So the author cut the drawing into four twenty-byte pieces and paid 5,500 satoshis to each one. The network did what it always does: recorded them, and moved on. Nodes have been carrying the cat in their UTXO set for over a decade.

Nobody holds a private key for those four addresses, because they were never addresses. The coins can't move. That's the cost of the drawing, and it was paid up front.

Block record

Height322,917

Timestamp2014-09-28 12:03:03 UTC

Mined bySlush Pool

Transactions458

Block size617,465 bytes

Nonce2,186,577,885

Hash000000000000000003edf2f6eddad491c31fe644b63d8dbb28d441811ac7d101

Open block 322,917 on mempool.space →

02 — The ledger

The four addresses that aren't

Read them as base58 and they look like ordinary destinations. Read the twenty bytes underneath and they spell the drawing. Every one of these outputs is still unspent today.

Output address · decoded bytes

Value

13vs7FtkinfdQFGjGSYXzmL5koKiDdyqsE········ /\_/\ ⏎ ···· _

5,500 sats

19hHSmsT61eD3ooxkx73VKwosBe4qJvpT1___/ o o \ ⏎ ·· /~____

5,500 sats

13wUrsKeZN9ezm6MY6GmbwnaQfc74eYdBu·=ø= / ⏎ ·(______)__m_

5,500 sats

1AxBpMWQFD8SZpCCPb3FYB1PG81ip1qjvKm) ⏎ + seventeen null bytes

5,500 sats

Total locked · 22,000 sats Status · unspent since 2014 Spendable · never

Data pulled from the raw block. Verify it yourself: the outputs are indexes 1 through 4 of transaction 7b537ad0…ea017.

03 — Who was first

Bitcat is the first cat.
Buddy is the first dog.

Dogs got there first, and the record is clear about it. Buddy was talked about on Bitcointalk in late 2013 and written into a block in May 2014 with a plain message: Buddy is the best dog in the world. Four months later, the cat arrived — and no cat on any chain predates it.

26 Oct 2013

Buddy

First mentioned on Bitcointalk

06 Dec 2013

Doge

Dogecoin launches

09 May 2014

Buddy

Written on-chain · block 299,825

28 Sep 2014

Bitcat

Drawn on-chain · block 322,917

2023

Popcat

Meme cat era begins

2024

Mew

The litter grows

2024

Wen

Nine years after Bitcat

Nine years separate the cat in the block from the cats on the charts. Everything that came after is a descendant of a joke somebody paid 22,000 satoshis to tell.

04 — Why it matters

A ledger is also a canvas

In 2014 the blockchain was still understood as an accounting machine. Bitcat was an early, cheerful argument that it was also a place to put things that aren't money — years before anyone said the word "inscription" out loud.

/\_/\

Older than the trend

Ordinals, inscriptions, NFTs, on-chain art — all of it arrived later. The cat was already in the UTXO set, doing the same thing without a name for it.

=ø=

Paid for in burned coin

22,000 satoshis went somewhere unreachable so the drawing could exist. No mint, no royalty, no take-back. The permanence has a receipt.

(______)

Impossible to fake

Every full node on earth carries it. You can't edit it, delete it, or mint a competing original. The timestamp is the whole point.

05 — The token

$BTCAT

The 2014 artifact belongs to nobody. $BTCAT is what the people who love it built around it — a community token on Solana carrying the oldest cat in crypto forward.

Ticker

$BTCAT

Chain

Solana

Origin block

322,917

Contract address

B1ceKAJsyncWeweJG9qoGeqUoawZKejzamTbBCLapump

Community on X View on pump.fun

Always check the contract address against this page and the community before trading. $BTCAT is a meme token with no team, roadmap, or promise of return — it exists because the cat does. Nothing here is financial advice.

Four outputs,one cat

The four addresses that aren't

Bitcat is the first cat.Buddy is the first dog.

A ledger is also a canvas

Older than the trend

Paid for in burned coin

Impossible to fake

$BTCAT

Four outputs,
one cat

Bitcat is the first cat.
Buddy is the first dog.