On September 17, 2026, an international research team announced in Current Biology that a small tiger cat from the cloud forests of Bolivia was a species science had never named. It was the first living cat species to be formally named and described in more than a century.
That same day, at 15:12 UTC, a trading pool opened on Solana. The token was called Tilcayo.
I’m Louise Lee. This piece takes apart Tilcayo: how a cat science had just recognized became a tradable asset the same day, and why a second token showed up on-chain under the cat’s nickname.
How the cat was identified
The story doesn’t start in a lab. It starts on the side of a road.
About ten years ago, someone found a kitten beside a road in Bolivia. The person who picked it up thought it was a house cat and took it home. After a year or so, something seemed off, and they handed it over to the Senda Verde wildlife sanctuary — in Coroico, near La Paz, on the edge of the Yungas valley.
In 2017, the sanctuary contacted Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz, a Bolivian biologist and National Geographic explorer. She identified it at the time as a northern tiger cat (Leopardus tigrinus) and took about a hundred photographs. By 2019 she was putting together a field guide to Bolivia’s wild cats. Lining her photographs up against the reference images, she saw that the coat patterns didn’t match — most of those references were Brazilian cats.
The rest of the work went to genetics. The team sequenced DNA from 38 tiger cats: living animals, roadkill, and eight museum specimens. The conclusion was that the South American tiger cat is not one species but five. The Bolivian lineage split from its relatives roughly 1.4 million years ago.
That produced Leopardus tilcayo. Tilcayo is the local name for the cat, and the team kept it as a nod to local knowledge.
Very little about this cat is certain. It is roughly 46 cm long and weighs about 1.4 kg, smaller than an average house cat, with pale brown fur and irregular rosette markings. When the paper was published, researchers had examined only two live individuals, plus a handful of camera-trap records. The ten-year-old male at the sanctuary is the only individual known to be living under human care.
The people at the sanctuary call him Tigrino. That name matters later.
The first day of trading
The paper’s DOI was registered at 15:10:46 UTC on September 17. Tilcayo’s pool opened at 15:12:10 UTC. The gap is 84 seconds.
The pool is still there. The contract address is AyYNfPtftg2zDP4ZbgcoQMggQtwLh4zpfVVmUJs2thto, a Token-2022 token on Solana with a total supply of about 976 million. It went through Pump.fun’s fair-launch process and graduated the same day. The on-chain metadata describes it in one word: memecoin. No team, no website, and no link to any research institution.
Within hours of launch it logged more than 77,000 trades and about 7,900 unique trading addresses, with roughly $6.6 million in first-day volume and a 24-hour gain of over 4,700%. It closed its first day at $0.0020839312.
One number doesn’t line up. Promotional posts claim the market cap hit $4 million the instant trading opened. Third-party data puts the first-day closing market cap at about $2.03 million instead, on a supply of 976 million. The highest intraday price after launch came on September 19, which works out to roughly $4.08 million in market cap — also not at the open. I’m recording the $4 million figure as the promoter’s claim and nothing more.
The same day, a token named after the cat’s nickname
At 15:30:21 UTC — 18 minutes after Tilcayo opened — another pool went live. The token was called “Tigrino the Weird Cat”, contract address FKaJuPmxjYm9u4iDHxdYvA947vbjBQjpevQsBBVLns8z. One detail stands out: its profile on a price-tracking site links out to a BBC story about the cat.
The next morning at 11:06 UTC, another TIGRINO contract opened a pool, address 91ryaCo5yGpYZM3bs6GUPs97VWJQj7RozBmqPULgpump. This one got listed: KCEX opened TIGRINO/USDT spot trading on September 20 at 12:00 UTC. The story attached to it is that a Twitter user called devving started it and routes trading revenue to the sanctuary.
Tilcayo got a listing too, on the same small exchange — KCEX opened TILCAYO/USDT on September 22 at 08:30 UTC.
So what actually happened on September 17 is this. Science handed out two usable names: Tilcayo, the species epithet, and Tigrino, the sanctuary’s nickname. Within hours, the chain split into two camps, each turning one of them into a token. Two names for one cat became two completely different assets. By September 21, the Tigrino side had drawn about 6,000 holders in three days, with a fully diluted valuation around $760,000 and pool liquidity around $109,000. Tilcayo’s first-day closing market cap was about $2.03 million. By the standards of that week, both were busy.
What deserves more attention is the copycats. According to Phemex’s write-up, identical pools had appeared on at least six chains by September 19. As of October 12, Solana alone carried two contracts named TIGRINO, nearly ten times apart in market cap: about $34,000 and about $3,500. Same name, completely different thing.
Why it caught on
The first thing that set it apart is that the story was real. It wasn’t a mascot a project team drew out of thin air. It was a cat science had formally recognized, with photographs, a name, video, and a sanctuary where it lives. And the story isn’t finished: nobody knows the population size, and there isn’t a single clear photograph of the cat in the wild.
The next layer is that it got packaged as a character. The same animal was “the first new cat species in a century” in the media, “Tigrino” at the sanctuary, and “tilcayo” locally. Once a thing has several names, a meme has something to hold on to: you don’t have to read the paper. One photograph and one name are enough to pass the story on to the next person.
Another layer is that the playbook was already in place. It had been rehearsed repeatedly through 2026 — the Seattle raccoon with the unusually short spine, the shark that swam into Busan’s North Port, the Colorado marmot tracked for more than sixty years. Retail had already been trained to react fast. The gap between seeing a story and placing an order had been squeezed down to minutes.
The most ironic layer is the coverage itself. The Guardian, CBC, UPI and National Geographic all wrote about the cat. Not one wrote about a token. But those stories pushed the word “tilcayo” around the world, and anyone curious enough to search it would run straight into a token of the same name. The token’s issuers paid nothing for that exposure.
Then there’s the structure. This is a fair-launch token: no presale, no team allocation, the whole supply released at once. The other side of that structure is thin liquidity. It doesn’t take much money to push the price up, and it doesn’t take much to push it down. The price has already shown what that means.
These pieces are connected. Coverage pushed the name out, traders turned the name into liquidity, and liquidity drew more coverage. The name did a full lap in the middle, and nobody paid for promotion.
From just over $2 million to under $300,000
It closed its first day at $0.0020839312.
On October 4, the same pool closed at $0.00026818986 — 87.13% below the first-day close. Volume that day was just over $50,000, less than 1% of day one.
As of October 12, the price is $0.000296. Market cap and fully diluted valuation are both $289,038, the main pool holds $73,128 in liquidity, and 24-hour volume is $28,711 — roughly 85.8% below the first-day close.
The holder count is where the two sources disagree. Media reports on launch day said more than 4,000. On-chain data for October 4 shows 3,108, with the top ten addresses at 38.16%. That 38.16% includes the trading pool itself, so it doesn’t read directly as “whales in control”. I have no explanation for the gap between the two numbers, so both are here.
Tigrino trades far less. As of October 12, the contract listed on KCEX has a market cap around $34,000 and about $22,000 in liquidity; “Tigrino the Weird Cat” has a market cap around $3,500 and $33 in 24-hour volume.
Final notes
It took me a while to tell the two TIGRINO contracts apart. Same name, different logos, market caps ten times apart — and both sit at the top of a search box. For anyone who bought one of them, choosing the wrong one made all the difference.
So if I’m going to touch a token like this, what I actually do is specific: check the contract address character by character in a block explorer first, then look at when the pool was created. A name is public information and anyone can use it. Only one address is real.
From the DOI record to the first token’s open: 84 seconds. From fieldwork to the team confirming the cat was new: ten years.
About me and Tronsell.io
I’m Louise Lee, a researcher at Tronsell.io. Tronsell.io is in the TRON energy rental business: our own energy pool holds a steady stake of about 400 million TRX, and we supply roughly 3.7 billion units of energy and 35 million units of bandwidth, with more than 10 institutional clients served.
Provenance fact card
Data as of October 12, 2026 (UTC). Prices are quotes from that time and change constantly.
| Item | Detail |
| Token | Leopardus tilcayo (ticker: TILCAYO) |
| Chain / standard | Solana, Token-2022 |
| Contract | AyYNfPtftg2zDP4ZbgcoQMggQtwLh4zpfVVmUJs2thto |
| Main pool | PumpSwap, ASgoadVEDL8zJn6KLUiMSh9m8x2yYAEZPsUSpvxHj3LY |
| Pool created | 2026-09-17 15:12:10 UTC |
| DOI registered | 2026-09-17 15:10:46 UTC (paper DOI 10.1016/j.cub.2026.08.059; 84 seconds before the pool opened) |
| Launch | Pump.fun fair launch, graduated (100%), no presale, no team allocation |
| Total supply | 976,114,272 (~976 million) |
| First-day close | $0.0020839312, market cap about $2.03 million |
| First-day volume | about $6.6 million (first three daily bars: about $18.6 million) |
| Highest verifiable close | $0.0020839312 on September 17, day one (promotional posts claim a $4 million market cap at the open; no third-party confirmation) |
| October 4 close | $0.00026818986, −87.13% versus the first-day close |
| Current quote | price $0.000296; market cap / FDV $289,038; main pool liquidity $73,128; 24h volume $28,711 |
| Versus first-day close | about −85.8% |
| Holders | 3,108 (October 4 data); top ten addresses 38.16% (includes the trading pool itself) |
| Launch-day media reports | more than 77,000 trades, about 7,900 trading addresses, over 4,000 holders |
| CEX | KCEX, TILCAYO/USDT spot from 2026-09-22 08:30 UTC |
| Website / social | no website in the on-chain metadata; the price-tracking profile lists tilcayo.info and one X account |
| Team | anonymous, no public team information, no connection to the research team |
| Same-name tokens on the same chain | at least two TIGRINO contracts: 91ryaCo5yGpYZM3bs6GUPs97VWJQj7RozBmqPULgpump (listed on KCEX) and FKaJuPmxjYm9u4iDHxdYvA947vbjBQjpevQsBBVLns8z (“Tigrino the Weird Cat”) |
Sources
1. The science
- Lescroart et al., Phylogenomics and museomics reveal five distinct species of tiger cats in South America, Current Biology, September 17, 2026 (DOI 10.1016/j.cub.2026.08.059). Conclusion: the South American tiger cat is five genetically distinct species, one of them newly described here as Leopardus tilcayo (reported the same day or the next by The Guardian, CBC, UPI and BBC Wildlife).
- The Guardian, September 17, 2026: the cat is about 46 cm long and 1.4 kg, smaller than an ordinary house cat; the first living cat species formally named and described in more than a century.
- UPI, September 18, 2026: the team compared complete genomes from 38 tiger cats, including eight museum specimens; the tilcayo lineage diverged about 1.4 million years ago; a separate new subspecies was described in Peru.
- BBC Wildlife and National Geographic (photography by Fernando Faciole): the sanctuary individual is a ten-year-old male, at the time the only one known to be living under human care; the reports note pressure on the Yungas from logging, agricultural expansion, human-set fires and mining.
- The Telegraph (India), September 2026: after the story went viral, visitors flooded the sanctuary, the cat became easily stressed and was moved out of public view; sanctuary co-founder Marcelo Levy called it “a conservation ambassador in a matter of days”.
2. On-chain data
- DexScreener token endpoint: main pool ASgoadVED…J3LY (PumpSwap) created 2026-09-17 15:12:10 UTC; the price, market cap, liquidity and 24-hour volume cited in this piece; plus three later pools (two on Meteora, one Raydium pool quoting Tilcayo).
- GeckoTerminal token endpoint: total supply 976,114,272; Pump.fun graduation progress 100%, graduation timestamp 2026-09-17 15:12:10 UTC.
- Phemex research page: the Crossref DOI record was generated at 15:10 UTC, 84 seconds before the pool opened; first-day close $0.0020839312; first three daily bars about $18.6 million combined; October 4 close $0.00026818986 (−87.13% versus day one); October 5 liquidity $69,822; 3,108 holders and a 38.16% top-ten share (including the pool); identical pools on at least six chains by September 19.
- Bitrue research page: the trade count, unique trading addresses, volume and 24-hour gain within hours of launch; and the statement that the token has no official connection to the research team.
3. Exchanges and same-name tokens
- KCEX listing announcements: TILCAYO/USDT spot from 2026-09-22 08:30 UTC; TIGRINO/USDT spot from 2026-09-20 12:00 UTC, each with its contract address.
- Bitget wallet token page: the description of TIGRINO (91ryaC…pump) as started by Twitter user devving and routing revenue to the sanctuary, plus that contract’s volume and trading-address data.
- OneBullEx research page (September 21, 2026): Tigrino drew about 6,000 holders in three days, FDV about $760,800, locked liquidity about $109,100, GeckoTerminal safety score 60/100, no third-party audit.
- Coinatio token page: details for the other same-name contract FKaJuP…ns8z (“Tigrino the Weird Cat”), whose price-tracking profile links out to a BBC report.
- KuCoin news page, promotional post: claims a $4 million market cap at the open and more than 400 million impressions (a promoter’s claim, unconfirmed by third-party data and recorded here only for reference).
Disclaimer
This is a personal research note. It is not investment advice, and it is not a recommendation or endorsement of any token. The figures are on-chain readings taken at specific points in time; price, liquidity and holder structure can change sharply within a short window. Every token mentioned here has no product, no revenue and no disclosed team, and none of them has any official connection to the research cited. Tokens with the same name are common, so check the full contract address in a block explorer before trading. Memecoins are extremely volatile. Only put in money you can afford to lose entirely.