Pepe on the Blockchain
The rare-Pepe joke about artificial scarcity turned literal. From 2016 the Rare Pepe trading-card series was issued on Counterparty, on top of Bitcoin, one of the earliest NFT projects of any kind. A card called Homer Pepe sold for about $38,500 in January 2018, and PEPENOPOULOS went for $3.65m in October 2021. In April 2023 a PEPE memecoin launched with no involvement from Furie, who has never received any of it.
Part of Pepe
31 moments in this segment.
- - "Mad Karma with Jim Cramer". The image macro the record calls the first instance of memes being discussed as stocks: a Mad Money screenshot with the news ticker rewritten to list trending Reddit memes, posted to /r/AdviceAnimals on June 11th, 2012. It predates the /r/MemeEconomy subreddit by four years.
- - The first watermarked Rare Pepes. Rare Pepes as they began on 4chan's /r9k/ board in late 2014: original Pepe illustrations shared as though they were trading cards, some watermarked by their makers to protect their supposed value.
- - Monochrome Pepe pocket edition card. A trading card engraved in black-and-white hatching, titled 'POCKET EDITION MONOCHROME PEPE' and numbered 405 of 500.
- - Article on Venezuelans trading rare Pepes. A screenshot of a news article headlined about Venezuelan developers using Bitcoin and Rare Pepes against a dismal economy, with a frog image lower down the page.
- - The My Little Pepe card. A trading card headed 'My Little PEPE' whose art shows a green frog lying in a field beside a small white figure, with stat line and the note 'Well tamed'.
- - The plan to flood the Rare Pepe market. A 4chan /r9k/ thread from March 28th, 2015 in which a poster confesses to stockpiling rare Pepes in order to flood the market and crash their value, the joke economy acquiring its first market manipulator.
- - Rare Pepes listed on eBay. By April 9th, 2015 there were more than 230 "rare Pepe" listings on eBay. The joke that a JPEG could be rare, and priced, is the seed of everything from Rare Pepe trading cards to the NFT sales that followed.
- - The Rare Pepe market takes off. From the record's account of Rare Pepes: images of Pepe traded as if they were collectible cards. A March 2015 imgur gallery of over 1,200 Pepes drew 260,000 views in a week, and the collection was listed on eBay, where bidding reached $99,166 before the listing was pulled.
- - A Rare Pepe card. One of the Rare Pepe illustrations collected in the record: an original Pepe drawing treated as a collectible whose worth depends on how few copies exist.
- - A watermarked Rare Pepe. A Rare Pepe example. Makers watermarked their images so that copies circulating elsewhere could not dilute the original's supposed value.
- - Rare Pepe, traded as a card. A Rare Pepe from the record's examples. The format later moved onto the Counterparty blockchain through RarePepeWallet.
- - Another Rare Pepe illustration. One of the Rare Pepe illustrations in the record. An imgur gallery of over 1,200 of them drew 260,000 views in its first week in 2015.
- - Rare Pepe, one of thousands. A Rare Pepe example. By April 2015 there were over 230 rare Pepe listings on eBay, and by September that year the ads had spread to Craigslist.
- - Buying Rare Pepes on Craigslist. A New York City Craigslist ad from September 9th, 2015 offering $50 for Rare Pepes. A month earlier a Chicago listing had sought a "Rare Pepe Trader" as a third roommate.
- - RarePepeWallet. 2016: a database of Rare Pepe images formatted as trading cards and traded on the Counterparty blockchain using PepeCash. The joke about rare JPEGs had acquired real settlement rails.
- - The early-2017 meme drought report. Redditor deros94's report on an early-2017 meme drought, posted to /r/MemeEconomy on January 9th, 2017, arguing the meme landscape had become a "barren wasteland" of forced and rehashed ideas. The Daily Dot covered it, noting January is traditionally a slow month for memes.
- - "Bigger than Dogecoin". A February 13th, 2017 tweet arguing Pepe would outgrow Dogecoin because it could "literally rarify memes". Days earlier a card called "My Little Pepe" had sold for a million PepeCash, roughly $3,500.
- - A trader profile on Nasdanq's closed beta. A screenshot of a user profile on Nasdanq, the meme stock exchange built by /r/MemeEconomy volunteers, posted by Redditor Icedog68 on the day the closed beta launched, April 12th, 2017. The team had incorporated as NASDANQ LLC two months earlier.
- - The Homer Pepe card goes to auction. The Homer Simpson-themed Rare Pepe, listed for auction on July 3rd, 2017 with a starting price of 250 XCP. In January 2018 it sold for 350,000 PepeCash, about $38,500, at a Rare Pepe auction in New York, to a buyer named Peter Kell.
- - Rare Pepe auction at the Rare Digital Art Festival. Footage from the New York festival where Rare Pepe trading cards, issued on the Counterparty layer built on Bitcoin, were put up for auction in January 2018. The card known as Homer Pepe sold there on 13 January 2018 for around $38,500, an early instance of a meme image trading as a collectible token.
- - Where the crypto Pepe came from. A history of the Rare Pepe trading cards issued on Counterparty, a protocol layered on Bitcoin, and of how the character became a fixture in cryptocurrency communities. It is an origin account rather than a market discussion, and predates the token launches that later used the name.
- - Homer Pepe sells for 205 ETH. Peter Kell's Instagram post of February 27th, 2021 announcing he had sold the Homer Pepe card for 205 ETH, about $312,000, roughly eight times what he paid in 2018. He and the card had appeared in the 2020 documentary Feels Good Man.
- - Know Your Meme interviews the buyer of Homer Pepe. Know Your Meme sits down with Peter Kell, who bought the Rare Pepe card known as Homer Pepe and later resold it. Homer Pepe changed hands for about $38,500 at auction on 13 January 2018; Kell recounts the purchase and the later sale in his own words.
- - Rare Pepe exhibition at Narcissus Gallery. A recording from the Rare Pepe exhibition mounted by Narcissus Gallery with Vertical Crypto Art, which presented the Rare Pepe trading cards as a collaborative art project. The cards were issued on Counterparty, a token layer built on top of Bitcoin.
- - Rare Pepe cards go to auction at Sotheby's. A short film made when Rare Pepe cards were offered by a major auction house for the first time, with the collector known as TokenAngels consigning three cards to Sotheby's. The October 2021 sale included PEPENOPOULOS, which sold for $3.65m on 26 October 2021.
- - Joe Looney on building the Rare Pepe Wallet. Joe Looney, who built the Rare Pepe Wallet, talks through the trading-card project that grew on Counterparty from 2016 and the volunteer submission process behind it. It is a first-hand account of how the cards were issued, stored and traded.
- - Theo Goodman on the early Rare Pepe scene. Theo Goodman, one of the volunteers who vetted submissions to the Rare Pepe series, describes how he came to Bitcoin, the early Counterparty community and the cards he made himself. He also discusses the later Fake Rares series that grew out of it.
- - Pepe is Art exhibition tour. A walk through Scarce City's Pepe is Art exhibition, with interviews with several of the artists who contributed cards to the Rare Pepe series. The show presented the cards as a collaborative art project rather than a collection.
- - CoinDesk reports a surge in Pepe-branded tokens. CoinDesk reports a sharp rise in attention to tokens branded after Pepe, part of the memecoin wave of April 2023. The PEPE coin launched that month has no involvement from Matt Furie.
- - The history of Rare Pepes on The NFT Podcast. A podcast episode on the history and cultural significance of the Rare Pepe series, with guests from the collector community. It covers how the cards were issued on Counterparty and why the project is treated as a precursor to later digital-art work.
- - Counterparty and Rare Pepes with Dan Anderson. Dan Anderson, an early Counterparty developer and collector, gives a long account of the first token experiments built on Bitcoin and of the Rare Pepe card series that grew out of them. The episode is a technical and cultural history rather than market commentary.
