Where Are They Now? How Catie Wayne, AKA 'Boxxy,' Became An Early Internet Celeb, And What She's Been Up To Since Her First 'I'm Boxxy' YouTube Videos

Boxxy is the proto e-girl, first known for posting grainy webcam YouTube videos recorded from her darkened room, but best known for causing a 4chan war that momentarily shut down the site over a decade ago.

With her wide-eyed stare accentuated by thick eyeliner and her hair swept across her forehead in quintessential scene girl style, Boxxy accrued a legion of devout followers and even more zealous haters back in 2009.

A seminal internet meme, Boxxy's nearly instantaneous fame continues to inform the way people hope to go viral today. But Boxxy, whose real name is Catie Wayne, has largely shied away from the public eye in the decade following her viral moment.

So why did Boxxy decide to abandon her seemingly burgeoning online following, and what has she been up to in the years since?

Here's a look at Catie Wayne's life since she tore apart 4chan's /b/ board in 2009, from taking up cosplay and voice acting to minting NFTs that reprise her Boxxy fame.

Who Was Boxxy, And How Did She First Go Viral Online?

Way back in 2008, a YouTube video featuring a girl who called herself "Boxxy" was reposted to the site i-am-bored and then to 4chan, where it then massively exploded in virality despite being dormant on YouTube for months.

The innocuous video showed Boxxy speaking to the camera from a darkened room, her face lit by the light of her computer screen.

Numerous users in some corners of the internet took an immediate liking to Boxxy, taking her to be a girl who shares special "nerdy" interests like anime, comics and video games. Younger channers (as in 4chan users) took a particular interest in Boxxy, spamming her face across the messageboard site.

Why Did People Blame Boxxy For Tearing 4chan Apart?

Boxxy's excitable, erratic and quirky attitude found many admirers on 4chan's /b/ board, a "random" forum known for hosting everything from memes to explicit chatter. Known colloquially among channers as "b-tards," /b/ users found themselves divided between typically younger users who loved Boxxy and older channers who hated her with a burning passion.

Arguments over Boxxy took over 4chan in the subsequent weeks. Every thread on /b/ and beyond stood on the precipice of being derailed by Boxxy spam, leading hundreds of 4channers to set out to hack Boxxy's YouTube in search of her real identity.

A few Boxxy haters grew so tired of her loyalists spamming her face on the site, that they managed to DDoS 4chan and bring it down for several hours. And yet, Boxxy's identity remained a mystery.

Who Is Catie Wayne, And How Did People Find Out That She Is Boxxy?

As time went on and Boxxy's popularity failed to wane in certain corners of the internet, some 4chan users created the "Center for Boxxy Control and Restriction," hoping to hack Boxxy's various internet accounts and find her identity, or at least wipe her from the internet.

While initial attempts failed, some users managed to find a California address they believed to be Boxxy's home.

After the rude surprise of having strangers from the internet descend on her home, Boxxy stopped posting her videos. Friends and classmates from her art school would sometimes post a photo of her to a Boxxy forum, hoping to accrue some internet fame, but Boxxy largely ignored the hype surrounding her persona until November 2010, when she finally revealed her identity.

Close to graduating from art school, Wayne posted an eBay listing trying to auction off an InuYasha-themed satchel. The auction price went up as high as $800,000 before Wayne volunteered to take it down.

Instead, she went to a fan forum with an image proving her identity and gave out her PayPal account. In the end, it turned out to be Catie herself who revealed to the world that she was Boxxy.

What Has Catie Wayne Been Up To On YouTube Since Her Boxxy Fame?

Back in the early 2010s, Catie Wayne began posting videos to her YouTube channel ANewHopeee as any other YouTuber would. She posted sketch videos, makeup tutorials, hosted Q&As and even brought back her quirky Boxxy persona for a one-off gag.

But Catie never scaled the heights of fame she enjoyed as Boxxy with her newer and truer online persona. She was no longer the quirked-up champion of scores of anonymous internet users. She was any other YouTuber who made videos and took selfies with fans at VidCon, but even this fame was short-lived.

Catie Wayne stopped posting to her YouTube in June 2017 and went as underground as a once-major internet celebrity can go.

What Has Catie Wayne A.K.A. Boxxy Been Upto Since She Went Offline?

After completing a brief stint as the presenter for the YouTuber channel The Animalist News, Wayne largely went offline. According to her IMDb, Wayne did some voice acting in the late 2010s, voicing Marsha from the short-lived Disney show Billy Dilley's Super-Duper Subterranean Summer in 2017, and Obituary, an animated short about a girl that can talk to ghosts.

Boxxy also continues to attend conventions and still enjoys doing cosplay. Back in 2017, she posted several photos of her and her friend at San Diego Comic-Con where they went dressed up as Tracer and D.Va from Overwatch.

In 2018, Wayne extended her love of video games to actually help make one; BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm, a free indie RPG that played on various aspects of oldhead internet culture. Wayne is credited with helping conceptualize the game and voicing the game's main protagonist.

The last many people heard of Catie Wayne was when she minted a Boxxy NFT back in 2021, announcing it in classic Boxxy fashion.

Where Can You Find Boxxy Online Today?

Catie Wayne, or Boxxy, maintains a very minimal social media presence these days. Wayne rarely posts about her personal life, with her NFT announcement being her last reference to herself on her X (formerly Twitter) account @catiewayne.

Her personal Instagram @catieboxxy has been inactive since 2016, but Catie sometimes posts her selfies to @boxxybabee. Her last appearance on the account was in October 2021 when she showed off her cat dressed in a Halloween costume. The post is also the last time that Wayne has made a public post in reference to her teenage persona, and it may be the last we hear of it too.

For more on Boxxy, click here for Know Your Meme's encyclopedia entry.