Merv the Cat

Origin

Merv was found in 2017 in a janitorial closet in Los Angeles, covered in ants and exposed to cleaning chemicals, and taken in by Chanel, a makeup artist, who later raised her with her partner Chad Jamian, an actor. Her full name is given by her owners as Mervyn Cumberland Weems, and despite the name she is female, a detail that surprises enough viewers that the account has had to say it out loud more than once. The TikTok account @mervthecat was posting by 20 November 2022, and by 21 September 2023 the videos were already tagged #BAGAGWA, the family's spelling of the noise Merv makes when she is annoyed, alarmed or summoning something from beyond. No single upload can be called the first Merv video, because the account grew the way pet accounts grow, one loud cat at a time, but the vocabulary was fixed early: BAGAGWA for the yowl, SQWANCH for a cat, and captions typed as if Merv had learned English from a phone keyboard she was standing on.

Spread

The format is fixed and it works. Merv makes a sound that lands somewhere between a word and a threat, a human answers her as if she has made an argument, and the caption reports the exchange in Merv's own spelling, which is how lmoa rather than lmao became part of the bit. Non-fans found the account through explainers rather than through the videos themselves: on 18 May 2024 the animal behaviour creator @annieknowsanimals posted a breakdown titled what's the deal with Merv, using Merv's own audio, and TikTok's discovery pages filled with Merv the Cat Explained, Merv the Cat Explained Talking and eventually Merv the Cat Controversy. The controversy is mostly two things, neither of them scandal: viewers who insist the videos must be edited or dubbed, and a run of impersonator accounts, the most persistent being @mervthecat3, reposting stolen clips while TikTok declined to take them down. By September 2025 the account was reported at more than 2.4 million TikTok followers with 1.3 million more on Instagram at @mervthepet, and by 2026 it had passed 2.8 million with over 100 million likes. The pet press followed the audience: Catster ran a profile, and Parade Pets and AOL both picked up the clip in which Merv shuts new kitten Ham in a crate and then flatly denies having done it.

Legacy

Merv had a contract almost two years before she had a memecoin market. On 21 November 2024 a Solana token called Merv The Cat was minted on pump.fun, opened a Raydium pool seventeen minutes later, and settled into a small permanent life: a website with Mervert NFTs, a pledge to send proceeds to animal shelters, and roughly five thousand dollars of liquidity that is still there. Nothing happened for twenty months. Then on 3 August 2026 a second Solana contract appeared with the TikTok account linked in its listing, and this one caught: about 574,000 dollars of volume across 21,000 trades in its first day, at roughly 115,000 dollars of market cap on 25,000 dollars of liquidity. What followed is the cleanest example of contract spoofing in our records. Within 48 hours around eighteen more Merv contracts were deployed across Solana, BNB Chain and Robinhood Chain, and the copies were not even trying to be subtle: one Solana token writes its ticker with a right-to-left override so that vrem renders as merv, another appends an invisible word joiner to the end of the name, and several report market caps between five and 150 million dollars out of single pools holding a few thousand dollars, which is a number invented by an empty pool rather than a valuation. A cat who is famous for making a noise that sounds like a word, copied by tokens whose names are characters that are not there.

The Chain Trail

The OG token for this meme is Merv The Cat ($Merv) on Solana, launched 2024-11. MemePedia tracks 2 Merv the Cat tokens in total across Solana.

Key facts

• Merv is a female Siamese cat rescued in 2017 from a janitorial closet on the streets of Los Angeles, found covered in ants; her owners give her full name as Mervyn Cumberland Weems.
• She lives in Los Angeles with Chanel, a makeup artist who rescued her, and Chad Jamian, an actor.
• The TikTok account @mervthecat was posting by 20 November 2022; videos tagged #BAGAGWA appear by 21 September 2023.
• BAGAGWA is the family transcription of Merv's signature yowl; SQWANCH is her word for a cat, first seen in a Christmas video on 24 December 2024.
• Captions are written in Merv's voice with deliberate misspellings, including lmoa for lmao, which became part of the format.
• The animal behaviour creator @annieknowsanimals posted an explainer using Merv's audio on 18 May 2024, one of the routes non-fans found the account.
• Reported at more than 2.4 million TikTok followers and 1.3 million Instagram followers at @mervthepet in September 2025, passing 2.8 million TikTok followers and 100 million likes by 2026.
• Impersonator accounts, notably @mervthecat3, reposted stolen Merv videos and were not removed, generating the Merv the Cat Controversy discovery pages on TikTok.
• There is no Know Your Meme entry for Merv the Cat as of 5 August 2026.
• The first Merv the Cat contract we can verify was minted on Solana on 21 November 2024 at 04:30 UTC and still holds about 5,300 dollars of liquidity.
• The contract that made a market was minted on 3 August 2026 at 23:21 UTC and traded about 574,000 dollars across 13,890 buys and 7,282 sells in its first 24 hours.
• Roughly eighteen further Merv contracts were deployed on 4 and 5 August 2026 across Solana, BNB Chain and Robinhood Chain.
• One Solana copy uses a right-to-left override character so its ticker vrem displays as merv, and another appends an invisible word joiner to the token name.
• Several of the 5 August 2026 copies report market caps between 5 million and 150 million dollars from single pools holding under 75,000 dollars of liquidity.