In early June 2021 there was a significant surge of interest in animal coins, as Twitter personalities such as, Elon Musk, seemingly got behind tokens like DOGE after, also seemingly, denouncing Bitcoin. Catapulted into the limelight was the most popular of the animal tokens, DOGE. This popularity brought on a ripple of copycats, which used iterations of token names that slipped ‘DOGE’ in them or used a dog as a logo/mascot. A lot of the energy behind the popularity of these animal coins was that you could buy a lot of them for cheap. Quantity over quality, that’s how the saying goes, right? The OG crypto community was confused by this logic, and that’s when we saw responses to this phenomena by the YFi (Yearn Finance) crew with their Woofy token (WOOFY) and 88mph with their dog token, Einstein (EIN). As there seemed no end in sight to the popularity of these animal tokens, the Sushi community starting chatting about creating a SUSHI mascot token themselves. Many offered suggestions to what the token name would be, such as: $NYAN, $NEKO (Japanese word for cat) and even that other word for kitties showed up, $PUSSY. Given that the original SushiSwap logo had similarities to the Nyan cat, it was fairly easily agreed upon that the animal had to be a cat as a nod to that era. Although the sentiment around animal tokens is very lighthearted and Sushi’s MEOW token was made in good fun, the Sushi developers wanted to make this new token count and make it useful for Sushi’s suite of products. Additionally, after the launch of BentoBox, many Sushi community members were still unclear on the benefits of migrating their assets to the token vault. As a reminder, any asset deposited into BentoBox right now, can earn yields through flash lending and is placed into strategies to earn even more! One strategy is the Sushi Strategy, where deposited $SUSHI tokens are automatically staked into the the SushiBar and earn you a piece of platform transaction fees, no extra steps or gas costs required. Meowshi is a tool that takes advantage of the power of BentoBox, by providing instant value to the vault, the various products that use the vault and to people who want to flash loan xSUSHI. Each xSUSHI BentoBox “share,” which adjusts based on yield, is represented by 100,000 MEOW tokens.