Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
On May 17, 2023, Grumpy Cat Limited, the extremely litigious corporation that owns the rights to the famous memes “Nyan Cat” and “Grumpy Cat,” served a cease and desist demand letter to the makers of the “Grumpy Cat Coin” and “Nyan Meme Coin” tokens via two separate NFTs, which they transferred to the deployer address of both coins.
The attorney, Kia Kamron, represents both Nyanifi, Inc (and creator Christopher Orlando Torres) and Grumpy Cat Limited. The Grumpy Cat account then issued a formal statement about $GrumpyCat on the Grumpy Cat twitter account, warning holders and prospective buyers that they are “enriching scammers and intellectual property thieves.” This isn’t the first time that a legal document has been served on-chain. Holland & Knight served a restraining order via NFT last year to an unnamed defendant in a case related to a hacking, which was approved by the New York State Supreme Court.
In this case, this is not a motion, or restraining order, or anything requiring actual service — it’s a demand letter, effectively telling them to stop doing anything related to Nyan Cat and Grumpy Cat, or face the legal consequences. As of writing, the $grumpycat token has a market cap of $5.79 million, with a 24 hour volume of $595,000 and 2899 holders. Nyan Meme Coin is in its infancy, and isn’t even the only Nyan Cat token out there. In fact, this entire series of sentences took me 20 minutes to write as I painstakingly read through both cease and desist letters to make sure that I was addressing the correct Nyan Cat or Grumpy Cat token.
