Rarepepe: How pepes were made provably rare on the bitcoin blockchain, and what it has meant for NFT culture and technologyRarepepe is often credited as being the NFT project that gave birth to cryptoart. The history of Pepe the Frog and the Rarepepe project encapsulates themes and subject matter important to the development and history of the 21st century, especially regarding internet culture and its intersection with politics, society, technology, and art. As such, Rarepepe acts as a prism through which we can understand much of who we are and how we got here over the past 2 decades. It’s a closeup snapshot and portrait of what will be remembered as a critical turning point for mankind. It is singular as a project within the NFT space. Not only is it one of the first NFT projects ever, it has several other unique attributes. It was minted on the Bitcoin blockchain using the Counterparty protocol, which was an important innovation in and of itself. The art is entirely user generated from the Rarepepe community over the course of two years (2016-2018). It has 1774 unique cards, each with their own issuance making the entire number of available assets quite large. It contains many ‘firsts’ in the NFT space: first music embedded in an NFT; first NFT bonus content; first NFT used as a currency; some of the first GIFs minted as NFTs. Rarepepe was the first NFT project to riff on various cultural subject matters, including politics, sports, cartoons, fine art, movies, the economy, and of course, cryptocurrency. As the famous crypto artist known for his glitch style XCOPY once tweeted, “whenever you think you’re first, check if rare pepes did it years ago” 3/17/21. The project’s provenance is rich and timeless, which makes it the most interesting things going on in the NFT space. I hope you enjoy learning about the history and provenance of this remarkable movement in blockchain art.The History of Pepe the FrogIt all started in 2005 with the creation of the Boy’s Club comic by artist Matt Furie. Boy’s Club is a series of four comic books that “showcase slacker roommates Andy, Brett, Landwolf, and Pepe in a series of comical vignettes combining laconic psychedelia, childlike enchantment, drug-fueled hedonism, and impish mischief.” They’re great. They capture a certain disillusionment felt by many older millennials coming of age and starting careers in the mid 2000’s. In Boy’s Club 2, Furie depicts a situation in which Pepe is seen peeing with his pants pulled all the way down to the floor, how children often pee. He is later confronted by his buddy Landwolf – the particularly boisterous and off-color member of the troupe – who says “Hey Pepe – I heard you pull yer pants down all the way to go pee” to which Pepe responds with his classic line “feels good man.” It’s this vignette, and specifically the line “feels good man,” that spawned a thousand memes and has continued to define meme culture to this day.Furie posted this strip on Myspace where it was quickly picked up and proliferated across the internet. Hundreds of thousands of iterations were created and shared across Myspace, Gaia Online, reddit, 4chan, and internet chat rooms. Pepe became a medium to express emotion and reactions to personal experiences and du jour news items. It became so pervasive that if you don’t know about Pepe, its because you are too young, too old, or have been living under a rock since 2008. Pepe’s only real contemporary with as much notoriety is Wojak, aka Feels Guy, and the two are often paired together to express the entire complement of internet emotions.Pepe Develops a Life of its OwnSuch fame did not come without a dark side. As Pepe proliferated across the internet, the famous frog also found an uncomfortable home in alt-right white nationalist 4chan forums. Pepe became such a powerful subject matter medium that Pepe memes were used as a dog whistle by President Trump to signal acceptance and support of these groups. In 2015, Donald Trump retweeted a representation of himself as Pepe that originated in an alt-right 4chan forum, supposedly as a clarion call of solidarity with them and the views expressed in their community. The white supremacist Richard B. Spencer wore a pin of Pepe on his jacket in the famous video of him being punched in the face. Hilary Clinton’s campaign cited Pepe as a symbol associated with white supremacy, and the Anti-Defamation League subsequently included Pepe in its database of hate symbols.Matt Furie was decidedly upset about how Pepe was being used and took to defending Pepe. He successfully sued Alex Jones for his copyright infringing use in merchandise. He fought the Anti-Defamation League, requesting to have Pepe removed from its list of hate symbols. Unfortunately these efforts failed. In 2017, as part of Free Comic Book Day, Furie symbolically killed Pepe in a comic strip to voice his objection to Pepe’s use as a hate symbol.The history of Pepe the Frog as a comic and meme was brilliantly captured in a documentary titled “Feels Good Man” which won an Emmy in October of 2021 for Best Documentary. It’s a beautifully done work that I highly recommend.JPEG Trading Kicks OffIn a parallel universe, while Pepe was taking on an outsized role in the tapestry of American politics and internet culture, early advances in blockchain technology were starting to take shape. One motif in ‘Pepe twenty-teens memery’ was the concept of rareness. It was an in-joke where Pepe memers claimed to have the rarest pepes, replete with admonition that no one should steal their pepe memes. The joke came to a head when memers started selling pepe jpegs on ebay in 2015, although it is a matter of debate whether actual sales occurred. At the time, the ability to ‘right-click save’ prevented digital scarcity, and therefor true ownership of digital goods. Sure, you could be cited as the creator and as creator you obtained copyright over your images, but provable ownership of a digital good was still beyond mainstream reach. That all changed with the blockchain, which made ownership of digital goods, whether coins, tokens, or NFTs provably scarce. In 2014 Kevin McCoy created the first proto-NFT titled “Quantum” on Namecoin, the first Bitcoin fork. This accomplishment was a monumental shift in the concept of provable ownership of digital goods, and the first instance of a non-fungible digital “token” was created – although the term NFT was still some years away. The website https://nfttimeline.com/ is an excellent resource for navigating the earliest instances of NFTs and NFT-like digital items. Similarly, the twitter user @wrabbit1111 has put together an excellent infographic describing the pre-Ethereum “digital antiquities” market.One of the first platforms that enabled the creation of non-fungible tokens was Counterparty. It was developed in 2014 by using a ‘proof-of-burn’ mechanism whereby 2,140 Bitcoin – approximately $1.8M in USD at the time – were burned in order to issue XCP, Counterparty’s native token. The first large scale project to issue NFTs on the Counterparty platform was Spells of Genesis, the first blockchain based mobile game ever made, pioneered by the visionary Shaban Shaame (@shaban_shaame).Rarepepe Makes its Mark on the BlockchainThe second large scale NFT project to emerge on Counterparty is the subject of this article: Rarepepe. The ability to create truly rare Pepes with provable digital scarcity and ownership took the rare pepe joke and turned it on its head. Pepe memes could now be created in a way that made their ownership and provenance provable and scarce, and therefor bought and sold in markets. Following the Spells of Genesis lead, a group of cypherpunks and early bitcoin adopters created a platform for the minting and sale of truly rare pepes. In 2016, Joe Looney (@wasthatawolf) forked Freewallet’s code to create a rarepepe wallet (rarepepewallet.com), a marketplace for buying and selling these digital artifacts. It was one of the first platforms that enabled people to transact digital artworks. The first rarepepe card titled ‘rarepepe’ was designed and issued by “Mike” (@rarepepe) on September 9th, 2016, and is now referred to as ‘the Nakamoto Card.’ It is widely regarded as an NFT grail by collectors for its historical significance and regularly sells for for hundreds of thousands of dollars, notwithstanding there being 299 in existence. It features a hand drawn portrait of Dorian Nakamoto…
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