Dogecoin shipped on 6 December 2013. Twenty-six days later, on New Year's Day, a cat drawn out of keyboard characters on a Japanese textboard got a chain of its own. That was Monacoin — Japan's first cryptocurrency, and the first meme coin to follow the dog.
It was never announced by a company. It was posted to 2channel by an anonymous account calling itself Mr. Watanabe, who has never said who he is, and then it was carried for twelve years by people tipping each other over manga, art and bad puns.
Now the cat is on Robinhood Chain. Same face. Same joke. New ledger.
Monā is Shift_JIS art — the Japanese cousin of ASCII art, built from a character set wide enough to draw with. He first appeared on 2channel around the turn of the millennium and never left.
Read his face closely and it's punctuation doing a job it was never designed for. The eyes are an apostrophe and a grave accent. The mouth is ∀, the universal quantifier, borrowed straight out of predicate logic because it happened to look like a smile. The ears are two carets. That's the whole cat: ( ´∀｀)
His name comes from what he says. The old thread has him replying おまえもなー — omae mo nā, "you too, mate." Somebody clipped the last two syllables and the cat had a name.
3 名前：名無しさん ：thread log
Twenty-six days after the dog
Dogecoin shipsThe joke works. A meme gets a blockchain and people notice.
A thread on 2channelMr. Watanabe posts the idea to Japan's largest textboard and describes it less like a currency than like a game about finding hashes.
Monacoin is bornLaunched on New Year's Day with no premine. A hard fork of Litecoin, retuned: 1.5-minute blocks, 105,120,000 coins, difficulty retargeted every single block.
Tipping cultureMONA becomes the tip jar of the Japanese internet — thrown at manga artists, illustrators and good posts. Shops start taking it. One holder buys land. Another builds a Shinto shrine to the coin.
SegWit, earlyMonacoin activates SegWit ahead of Bitcoin, and swaps its mining algorithm to Lyra2REv2 to keep the ASIC farms out. The cat coin ships upgrades the majors are still arguing about.
The topMONA runs to roughly $16 and a billion-dollar market cap, driven almost entirely by one country's internet.
Rehashed on Robinhood ChainTwelve years on, the cat is redrawn on a chain that was already covered in them.
4 名前：名無しさん ：ID:robinhood
Robinhood is the cat chain
Every chain ends up with a mascot it didn't ask for. Robinhood Chain got cats. So there was only ever one 2014 meme worth bringing across, and it isn't the dog.
Monacoin ran on its own Litecoin fork, mined by graphics cards in Japanese bedrooms. That chain still exists and still works. This is not it. $MONA on Robinhood Chain is a tribute token — the meme, redeployed by people who think the oldest cat on the internet deserves a seat on the cat chain. Nobody here speaks for Mr. Watanabe. Nobody ever has.
Monacoin, 2014 — the original
Born
1 January 2014
Origin
2channel, Japan
Author
"Mr. Watanabe" (unknown)
Base
Litecoin hard fork
Algorithm
Lyra2RE(v2), ASIC-resistant
Block time
1.5 minutes
Supply
105,120,000 MONA
Premine
None
The 2014 mint. Cat face, ∀ mouth, no committee, no roadmap.
5 名前：名無しさん ：how to
Getting some
Get a wallet on Robinhood ChainAny EVM wallet works. Add the Robinhood Chain network and fund it with gas.
Paste the contractSearch by address, not by name — tickers are free and everyone takes them. Match all 42 characters against the one on this page.
Set your slippage and swapThin books move. Start small, see how it fills, go again.
Tip somebody with itThat's what MONA was actually for. Twelve years of Japanese artists got paid in this cat. Keep the habit.
