According to Motherboard, those who came from the MoMA and Metropolitan Museum of Art that saw the auction stated “I don’t know what just happened, but it was incredible”, further legitimizing Rare Pepe as fine art. And as a HODL’r of Rare Pepe’s himself, Looney was all smiles during this historic moment. When the establishment art world butts up against memes and Bitcoin. Rare Pepe Wallet → Use a 12-word passphrase or connect a Ledger hardware wallet device via USB.About → Visit the Book of Kek to learn more about the history of Rare Pepes and Bitcoin NFTs. Emblem Vault has played a key role in Rare Pepes reaching a wider audience.

nakamoto card

The Rare Pepe Wallet was created by developer Joe Looney shortly after. It’s a web-based, encrypted wallet that runs on Counterparty. However, these projects failed to reach widespread popularity. They remained mostly unknown to all but those who were well-versed in cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies. Additionally, since the cards’ inception, Rare Pepes have been released weekly to the general public and the creators also deployed an airdrop. Currently, there are two series of the official cards and users can visualize these rarities while surfing the Rare Pepe Directory.

NFT Timeline: The Beginnings and History of NFTs

The Rare Pepe economy is based on real money, and PepeCash is starting to take off. A recent price jump seems to have been triggered by a January Vice articleand an article Wednesday in France’s Le Mondethat introduced Rare Pepe Wallets to a new group of meme fanatics. One thing you’ll notice about the selection of Pepe cards—and the Rare Pepe trading community at large—is that they don’t carry even a whiff of Pepe’s status as an alt-right, white supremacist, pro-Donald-Trump icon.

pepe cards

The backbone of the Rare Pepe Wallet is the Counterparty platform, which is built upon the bitcoin network. With a native decentralized exchange and token, Counterparty was built atop the open and decentralized Bitcoin network to let users mint, buy, and sell unique digital assets. Finally, the potential of rarepepe model doesn’t end with simple digital asset collection and trading. What’s even more remarkable about this token model is that third party developers or projects can bring external value and use cases to pepe tokens thanks to their open and permissionless nature.

And they “set the stage,” Looney recalls, for the creation of more assets that were not strictly “money” on the Bitcoin blockchain. In September 2016 the very first Rare Pepes were minted and sent to users in the Telegram |Telegram chat dedicated to discussing Counterparty. More soon followed and this spurred developers to build platforms for the purpose of cataloging and exchanging these unique images, thereby creating the first Crypto art|Crypto Art market in 2016.

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Rare Pepes were minted on Counterparty, a layer built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain that provides it with DeFi and NFT features. There, on Counterparty, Rare Pepes could be bought in exchange for Bitcoin or XCP, the original Counterparty token.You can explore the Counterparty blockchain through various block explorers. And then we have gotten some where it's like somebody literally took five seconds, went into Microsoft Paint, and drew a Pepe. So we'll say that low-effort Pepes are not going to be accepted. There's some really, really good ones that people definitely spent a lot of time and are very talented artists.

One day, a member of this group posted a different sort of card to the Counterparty group chat. It was a twist on the popular character Pepe the Frog, a pouty cartoon created by an artist named Matt Furie in his 2006 “Boy’s Club” comic, who gets into mischief with his “slacker” roommates. One of the more popular NFT collections on the market is NBA Top Shot. The NFT project lets sports fans own a piece of the game they love. This collection is one of the first to transform cultural moments — via sports footage — into digital collectibles.

Rare Pepe

Additionally, it stands as one of the first virtual worlds owned by users. You’ll need to spend ETH on the platform to trade and breed your cats. However, because you can effectively generate new assets via breeding and then sell that new NFT on the open market, the game comes with a unique appeal for many prospective gamers. CryptoPunks first hit the market in 2017 and was launched by product studio Larva Labs. The project was one of the earliest NFT generative art collections ever launched, and it directly inspired the current crop of popular generative PFP projects, like Bored Ape Yacht Club. In this respect, it’s one of the most influential NFT projects of all time.

The trope of trading and collecting “Rare Pepes,” distinctive images of the famous frog, has been part of meme culture for years. FDCARD, on the Counterparty platform, which was later used in its strategic blockchain card game, Spells of Genesis. In the game, players can collect, trade, and combine assets called ORBs to build the strongest decks on the Bitcoin blockchain, test them against opponents, and explore the fantasy realm of Askian.

I feel like I should stress at this point, this is completely serious. A rare Pepe or RarePepe is a variation on the "Pepe the Frog" internet meme, itself based on a character created by Matt Furie. The related Rare Pepe crypto project, created by various artists worldwide between 2016 and 2018, was based on the aforementioned meme and traded as non-fungible tokens recorded on the CounterParty platform.

Artist Matt Furie's character Pepe the Frog has been a reaction image for almost a decade; but it's mostly in recent years that the thousands of edits of the frog resulted in the coining of the term "Rare Pepes". Here's how your favourite problematic meme can be worth up to $11,000. The supply of only 300 will be music to the ears of current holders and those realistically interested in becoming one.

I think those guys in that article are probably the ones spending $40,000 for a Rare Pepe. Dogecoin, for example, was just a rebranded Bitcoin running on the same technology. PepeCash is different because of its connection to the Rare Pepe cards themselves, which are fun to collect and desirable to meme aficionados on their own terms.

Now, everyone in the Mastercoin ecosystem could see each other, and no one was on an island — network effect was possible. But because Mastercoin required you to be on a whitelist to issue a token, you couldn’t achieve network effect after all. This is the same technology that drives cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, and, in fact, the Rare Pepe tokens live on the Bitcoin blockchain, making the frog meme tokens as provably rare and as secure as Bitcoin itself. But even cartoon amphibians can go through a metamorphosis. Pepe soon took on a life of his own, and his mischief became much less impish. Users depicted Pepe as a crudely drawn, bright-green frog with enormous eyes and a wide mouth, often shown looking vaguely sad or slightly sly.

As more of them wind up in “diamond hands” supply will diminish, pushing prices higher. Dorian Nakamoto was suddenly everywhere, and it seemed for the first time, the decentralized finance movement had a face. In this way, The Nakamoto is not only the integration of the greatest Web2 meme of all time but the combination of it and the first and greatest meme of Web3. Fake Rares have been an extremely positive force in the Rare Pepe ecosystem, as they have allowed for fun to still be had with the beloved collection. So far, there have been 12 Series of Fake Rares, and there are no signs of slowing. Cited by veterans of Web3 culture as the birthplace of the CryptoArt movement — from Matt Kane to Vincent Van Dough — The Nakamoto and the rest of the Rare Pepe ecosystem are invaluable and incomparable.

The absurdity of this project is not lost on its participants. “We’re using the most secure financial computer application ever known to man to swap cartoon frog pics,” Steffen Cope, a Web developer who creates and trades Rare Pepes, told me. A rare Pepe is a variation of the popular meme character that is considered to be more valuable or rare.

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Mr. Fox, we looked at the complex https://crypto-trading.info/ of Pepe the Frog, first as a comic book character, then as a symbol of right-wing extremism, and finally, as a tool for early crypto artists to express themselves. It’s kind of like you have paintings on canvas, you have sculptures, you have Rare Pepes on Bitcoin, you have CryptoPunks on Ethereum. So, that’s kind of my ten thousand foot view of what it is. Just looking at the turnout here, it’s pretty clear that people do see value in it.

As the inception of https://cryptonews.wiki/ art, the minting of The Nakamoto was a true paradigm shift. Digital culture will forever be divided into the period before The Nakamoto and everything after its creation. Established in 2016, Rare Pepe Wallet is one of the earliest blockchain tools that made it possible to buy, sell and trade digital artworks. Although these tradeable artworks live a very different life today as NFTs, a clear line can be drawn between contemporary non-fungibles and Rare Pepe, a meme that lived within the crypto community for years. We’ve seen Rare Pepestraded on Craigslistbefore, where physical drawings or printouts of the frog that were offered in exchange for cold, hard cash—sometimes as much as $100.

The USDA total of 1,774 official cards were released for the project across 36 series, so this particular card is definitely rare and valuable. It will be interesting to see if this trend continues and if more rare cards are sold for high prices in the future. Overall, Rare Pepes are a good collection to look through, because they went from a bear market in the beginning, and then through the end, it was the bull market. We probably closed the directory right at the peak of the last bull market — like, March 2018 was when it started to fall off the cliff again. The earlier Rare Pepes are more joking about prices going down, and then towards the end, it’s the more euphoric Pepes. The story of Rare Pepes is very much the story of the overall cryptocurrency space.

The https://currency-trading.org/off for this near-guaranteed trade is likely going to be a long time horizon. If I had to guess I'd say this looks like a multi-year play but I think as web3 begins to infiltrate and disrupt industries of the past, people will shift their focus to where it all started. The honest truth is that it's much harder for the average person to buy NFTs on Bitcoin as compared to Ethereum, Solana, or any of these other new blockchains.

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I’m running this wallet, and then at exactly the same time — I think it was a week after Mike dropped the first Rare Pepe in the chat — the whole “Pepe the frog is racist” came out. Rare Pepe WalletThere is also Book of Orbs, a mobile Counterparty wallet/collection book which allows users to collect and trade pepe tokens on their phones as well as other collectible tokens. There are great Counterparty compatible wallets for Rarepepe tokens available where you can collect and trade your pepe. Rare Pepe Wallet, the web wallet specifically built for pepe is a great place to start pepe collection. The illustrations themselves and the pepecash price pump are less interesting aspects of the whole movement at least to me.

Rare Pepes on the Bitcoin Blockchain.

But you may also be wondering what use cases those user generated “dank” pepe cards have. Unless there is any valid use cases for those cards, they are useless and nobody will want them, aren’t they? Ultimately, owning a BAYC NFT is the price of admission to the Bored Ape Yacht Club community. Once in, owners get access to exclusive merchandise, live events, voting rights, and more. With most Ape sales going for hundreds of thousands of dollars, this NFT collection is considered one of the most prominent and profitable examples of the medium.

In my opinion, this is the biggest advantage of using tokens on a public blockchain and this type of cross collaboration has started to emerge already with Pepe. Along with projects like SoG, rarepepe has been proving the potential of digital asset collection even without an initial valid use case. Also, rarepepe token supply is locked on the blockchain, making them truly scarce(“rare”) digital assets. Decentraland is a browser-based game where users can buy and sell virtual plots of land and in-game items. It was created by Argentinians Ari Meilich and Esteban Ordano, who began working on the project in 2015.

However, I would argue this is not correct because this act of collecting something whether it’s a piece of art, comics or frog memes has undeniable utility by itself. CryptoKitties was created by Canadian studio Dapper Labs and launched in 2017. It’s one of the first blockchain games to be built on Ethereum, and it was the first project to receive widespread media attention. It was also the inspiration for ERC-721, an open standard that describes how to build NFTs on Ethereum virtual machine compatible blockchains.

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