You can't talk about CryptoArt without talking about Rare Pepes. The Rare Pepe meme is the real origin of much of CryptoArt's culture, aesthetic, and technology. But until recently, I only knew of Pepe the Frog as a meme co-opted by the alt-right as a hate symbol. Before I could feel comfortable writing about Rare Pepe, I needed to understand what role he played in this diverse, accepting, community of Rare Pepe enthusiasts. Jason Rosenstein of Archetype.mx ran the first live Rare Pepe Auction which was held at the inaugaral Rare Digital Art Festival. He described it to me this way:

"...the community that's formed in Telegram with over 1,500 members... in that chat we never speak about there being the alt-right association because we have always associated it with creativity. Before it was used for negativity in media, it was just a method to express anything. It started with Happy Pepe, and from there it took leaps in derivations from Happy Pepe to Sad Pepe to Smug Pepe to Angry Pepe. I think it is at that point where the alt-right started using him to express their hatred towards certain things. In our community, we don't tolerate that at all. It has happened that someone has jumped into the chat room and said something, but it's immediately deleted and that user is banned from ever being able to use the chat again.

Convinced the Rare Pepe communities goals were far from hate-based and rooted in creativity, I felt comfortable digging in further.

I reached out to Joe Looney, innovative technologist and creator of the Rare Pepe Wallet to help me better understand Rare Pepe. As the developer behind the Rare Pepe Wallet, there is a strong argument to be made for Joe as the father of the CryptoArt movement.

Joe explained to me that Rare Pepes are the perfect meme for the rare digital art application because the whole inside joke behind Rare Pepe is that "there where these rare digital Pepes, and in some cases, you couldn't show them because they were too rare." But with blockchain, digital scarcity, and Joe's invention of the Rare Pepe Wallet, Pepes really are provably rare, sellable artworks.

According to Joe the community started when a guy who goes only by the name "Mike" (@nola1978) created the first Rare Pepe by pairing a Rare Pepe image with a counterparty asset. A Telegram chat group was soon created as a result of others wanting to pair their Rare Pepes with counterparty assets. The breakthrough came when Joe used a technology called CounterParty to make it possible to buy and sell Rare Pepes on the Decentralized Exchange (or the DEX) to make it possible to buy, sell, and trade them.

Joe explained that the easiest way to think of Rare Pepes is like Garbage Pail Kids trading cards from the '80s, but instead of having a handful of artists, everyone is welcome to submit Rare Pepe artwork to be bought and sold. Once submitted, the artwork is reviewed by the Rare Pepe Foundation, frequently referred to as the "Scientists," to make sure it meets their set of nine rules:



1) Pepes must be 400 x 560 pixels. They can look like trading cards, but it is not required.

2) Cards can be animated GIFs, but keep them to 1. 5 MB or less in size. Use compression.

2) Issuance must be LOCKED so your Pepe cannot be inflated.

3) Your Pepe must not be divisible. <— make sure!!

4) Make sure your artwork at least has something to do with Pepe.

5) No NSFW content please. Trying to be keep it light for now. (Pepe has a lot of bad press). If in doubt, message @nola1978 on Telegram before creating your asset.

6) When making your token it must have at least 100 shares and max 100k shares.

7) No websites or QR codes.

8) Only one submission per day per artist. We want to have variety.

9) Please allow 24 to 48 hours before bothering our experts about your submission.



They think of these rules as a spam filter. They are not trying to tell people what is good art and bad art.

The really groundbreaking and important thing to understand here is that Joe does not take a commission from the artist. Anyone can create a Rare Pepe, submit it for inclusion, and offer as many copies as they want for sale and at any price they want to sell it. And they are now selling for tens of thousands of dollars. At the Rare Digital Art festival in NYC last weekend, Homer Pepe, a one-of-one Rare Pepe CryptoArtwork broke a record in a live auction selling for $39k USD (350k in Pepe Cash). In less than an hour the auction cleared ~$100k in CryptoArt.

Joe continues to innovate in the CryptoArt space and push the envelope. By pairing the concept of an access token (an application from counterparty) to Rare Pepe and CryptoArt in general, Joe has made it possible to tie a song or a video game back to a Rare Pepe. Joe thinks of this as bonus content, or a VIP pass tied to a particular Rare Pepe card. It's a non-sharable link, masked and tied to a particular computer, that makes this extra content exclusively available to the owner of that specific piece of CryptoArt. This expands the art from being image-based to being multimedia-based. As Joe put it, you can't really do much with traditional art - but with CryptoArt, the sky is the limit. It can include music, video games, and goods that are useable in other games. By comparison, traditional art materials start to look limited in nature.

Another feature Joe pioneered is the Rare Pepe gift card. This allows you to create a Rare Pepe gift card that you use to send a Pepe to someone who currently does not have a account. All the recipient needs to do is go to the site and type in the code on the card, with no need to get Bitcoins.

Joe mentioned that one of his favorite artists is DaVinci. Davinci lives in Japan and owns a drone shop. A few examples of his work below: