YouTube Co-Founder Steve Chen is backing a memecoin project inspired by his cat

The feline star of YouTube’s first cat video is no longer with us, but his spirit lives on — in memecoin form.

Steve Chen, who co-founded YouTube alongside Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim in 2005, has thrown his support behind Pajamas, a cryptocurrency inspired by his cat. The coin launched on the Solana blockchain earlier this year as a tribute to Pajamas, who starred in some of the earliest cat videos on YouTube.

In a memorable video on Chen’s personal YouTube channel, Pajamas chases after a toy while a Nick Drake tune plays in the background. The clip has received nearly 500,000 views, which is quite a lot by 2005 YouTube standards.

Several of Chen’s social followers alerted him to the new memecoin, and he enthusiastically backed the project. He told Cointelegraph that he has spent 80 to 100 hours per week working on Pajamas. He also gave the coin a shout on his X account, where he shared a pic of the dearly departed kitty that inspired the venture.

Chen has embarked on several ventures of his own since selling YouTube to Google in 2006. His output has included a short-form video hub called MixBit and a “Twitch for Food” called Nom, but he is taking a cautious approach as he dives into the world of web3.

“Whenever I want to meet someone important or influential in the Web3 space, there is at least one person that warns me never to meet or talk to this person,” Chen told Cointelegraph. “Every day on Telegram, there are at least 25+ new people trying to find a way to steal my money.”

Will Pajamas become the next hot memecoin inspired by an internet-famous animal? It’s been an up-and-down few years for Dogecoin, but there many be room for a cat next to that dog in the wacky world of Web3. As for right now, Pajamas is currently trading for about two cents apiece.