Photo: Jiří Kasal, 2008. Czech Republic.
TYGR, the Roaring Kitty has a name.
For years, the kitten in Roaring Kitty's profile picture was anonymous — one of the most-recognized images in retail finance, and a stranger to everyone who saw it. Someone finally tracked it down.
How a kitten in a Czech village became the
face of the memestock movement.
Roaring Kitty was the face of finance in 2021. The WallStreetBets GameStop movement is one of the most viral finance stories ever. And Keith Gill, the leader of the memestock movement, operated behind this iconic picture of a kitten the entire time. You could say that this kitten is THE “Roaring Kitty”.
For years, nobody knew this cat's name. It was simply the Roaring Kitty profile picture. But today, that's changed.
A 2026 deep dive finally traced the photo back to its source: a small village in the Czech Republic, where in 2008, a photographer named Jiří Kasal snapped a photo of a local cat and uploaded it on stock image sites.
“We called this particular kitten Tygr. It lived a village lifestyle — it walked around the area wherever it wanted.”
Tygr is Czech for tiger. The kitten in the most shared profile picture in modern finance was named after the apex of the cat family, by neighbors in a village halfway around the world, years before anyone had ever heard of Roaring Kitty.
$TYGR on Solana is a tribute to that cat. The one that started it all. The original Roaring Kitty.
Source: @bagwalkbw on X
$TYGR / SOL
Tygr in the wild.
