Rare Pepes: The Bitcoin NFT Project That Came Before NFTs Had a Name

What Are Rare Pepes?

Rare Pepes are 1,774 digital trading cards minted as Counterparty assets on the Bitcoin blockchain between September 2016 and early 2018. They predate the term "NFT" by more than a year. They predate CryptoPunks by about nine months. The first card, RAREPEPE, now known as the Nakamoto Card, was issued on September 9, 2016 in Bitcoin block 428,919, with a supply of 300. The cards span 36 series. Each series contains 50 cards, except series 36, which has 24. They were submitted by hundreds of artists from a Telegram chat, curated by a small group of moderators, and minted on Counterparty, a metaprotocol that has been running on Bitcoin continuously since January 2014.

That's the short answer. The longer answer matters more, because Rare Pepes are the project where most of the conventions modern NFT markets take for granted (open submissions, on-chain provenance, community curation, secondary trading of digital art) were invented in real time, by people who didn't know they were inventing anything.

Where Rare Pepes Came From

Pepe the Frog appeared in 2005 in a comic book by Matt Furie called Boy's Club, originally posted as MySpace zines. The "feels good man" line came from the same comic. The image migrated to 4chan in 2008 and became one of the dominant memes of the early 2010s.

By 2014, 4chan users were posting "rare Pepes." These were variations of the meme presented as if they were collectibles, often with watermarks like "RARE PEPE DO NOT SAVE." The whole thing was a joke about the absurdity of digital scarcity. The joke was funnier because it was impossible: a JPEG can be copied infinitely. There is no such thing as a rare image file. Then Bitcoin made it possible.

In April 2015, someone listed a folder of 1,200 rare Pepe images on eBay. Bidding reached $99,166 before the listing was pulled. That was the signal that people were willing to pay real money for an artificial sense of digital ownership, even when the underlying object was just a directory of PNGs. The infrastructure to make those PNGs actually rare on a real blockchain didn't exist yet, at least not in a form anyone was using for art. Counterparty changed that.

How Counterparty Made Pepes Rare for Real

Counterparty launched on January 2, 2014, founded by Adam Krellenstein, Robby Dermody and Evan Wagner. It is a metaprotocol: a layer that extends Bitcoin by writing additional data into Bitcoin transactions and parsing it deterministically off-chain. Every Counterparty transaction is a Bitcoin transaction. The full history of Counterparty is secured by Bitcoin's hash power, the same way Bitcoin's own ledger is.

In practical terms, Counterparty lets anyone create a named asset on Bitcoin. You burn some BTC for the protocol's native fee token (XCP), pay the issuance fee, and your token exists on Bitcoin forever. By 2015, a Belgian studio called Spells of Genesis had used Counterparty to issue some of the earliest blockchain-linked trading cards. These were limited-supply assets paired with images for use in a mobile game.

Spells of Genesis was the proof of concept. Rare Pepes were the cultural moment.

The Nakamoto Card and the Telegram Group

In September 2016, an anonymous user known as "Mike" issued a Counterparty asset called RAREPEPE in a supply of 300, paired with an image of Satoshi Nakamoto rendered as a Pepe. He posted it to a small Telegram chat. Other people in the chat wanted to do the same. Within weeks, the group was filling up with submissions.

Joe Looney, a developer who had been around Bitcoin since the early days, forked an existing Counterparty wallet called Freewallet and turned it into the Rare Pepe Wallet. The wallet was a web app that let anyone view, hold and trade Pepe cards using a token called PepeCash as the medium of exchange.

The wallet took no commission. Artists kept 100% of their sales. Anyone could submit a card. A small group of moderators voted on which submissions made it into the official directory.

That model (open submissions, community gating, no platform commission, on-chain provenance) was a radical departure from how digital art had been distributed before. Joe Looney is often called the godfather of crypto art, and the case is hard to dispute. Rare Pepe Wallet was the marketplace where ordinary artists first published, listed and sold digital art with verifiable scarcity, full ownership, and no middleman taking a cut.

A few facts about how the project unfolded matter for collectors:

Submissions ran from September 2016 to early 2018. 1,774 cards across 36 series were officially accepted. Card supplies range from 1 (only seven 1-of-1 cards exist) up to 1 trillion. The cards live on Bitcoin as Counterparty assets and can also be wrapped into ERC-721 tokens via Emblem Vault for trading on Ethereum marketplaces.

The Sales That Made Rare Pepes Famous

If you've heard about Rare Pepes outside crypto-native circles, it's probably because of three sales. Homer Pepe (HOMERPEPE), January 2018. A 1-of-1 card created by an anonymous artist named ICQ sold at the Rare Digital Art Festival in New York for 350,000 PepeCash, equivalent to roughly $39,000 at the time. The buyer was Peter Kell. The auction was attended by representatives from the Met, MoMA and Sotheby's Institute. Matt Kane, an artist who was there, later called it "the most important NFT in art history." Kell sold the card three years later, in March 2021, for around $320,000.

Rare Pepe Nakamoto Card sales, 2021. Series 1, Card 1, the original RAREPEPE, began trading at six-figure prices once collectors started wrapping Counterparty cards into Ethereum-compatible Emblem Vaults. One Nakamoto Card sold for 147 ETH (around $500,000) in late summer 2021. Another sold during NFT.NYC for $500,000 to MetaKovan, the same collector who paid $69 million for Beeple's Everydays.

PEPENOPOULOS, October 2021. A 1-of-1 card minted in 2016 sold at Sotheby's for $3.65 million as part of a high-profile NFT auction. It remains one of the highest sale prices on record for a Counterparty-era NFT.

These prices aren't just speculation. They're the market putting a number on cultural priority. A Nakamoto Card minted in 2016 is the earliest tokenized digital art collection that anyone outside a closed beta could buy. There's no earlier comparable artifact.

What Makes a Rare Pepe Rare

The supply structure is the thing most newcomers miss. "Rare" in Rare Pepes does not mean "low supply" universally. It means whatever the artist decided to issue.

Some cards have a supply of 1. PEPENOPOULOS is one of those. Seven 1-of-1 cards exist across the entire collection. Other cards have supplies of 100, 300 (like the Nakamoto Card), 1,000 or 10,000. A handful, including PEPEREPUBLIC, were issued in supplies up to 1 trillion as a deliberate joke about the meme of "rarity" itself.

Practical consequences for collectors:

Floor price varies wildly between cards. A Series 12 high-supply card might trade for fractions of a cent. A 1-of-1 from Series 1 trades for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Series number doesn't strictly determine value. Some Series 1 cards are commodity. Some Series 30 cards are grails. Cultural significance, supply, artist reputation and historical reference all play in.

The official catalog is on rarepepedirectory.com. Every accepted submission is listed there, with the asset name, supply, series and card number. If a card isn't in the directory, it isn't a Rare Pepe. It's something else, often a Fake Rare or a derivative project.

The Political Footnote

Any honest write-up of Rare Pepes has to address the elephant. In 2015 and 2016, a subset of 4chan users tried to weaponize the Pepe meme for alt-right politics. The Anti-Defamation League added Pepe to its hate-symbol database in October 2016, with the explicit caveat that most uses of Pepe are not hate-related. Joe Looney has noted that the ADL entry came almost on top of the launch of the Rare Pepe Telegram chat, which was bad timing for everyone involved.

Matt Furie, Pepe's creator, has spent years trying to reclaim the character. He launched a #SavePepe campaign, sued multiple alt-right figures and organizations, and in 2021 collaborated with the original Rare Pepe community on a final card, FEELSGOODMAN, which was issued on both Bitcoin and Ethereum. The Rare Pepe community has consistently disavowed the use of Pepe as a hate symbol. Looney described the political association as "old news" already by 2018.

This matters for collectors because the cultural framing of Rare Pepes today is almost entirely about crypto art and Bitcoin history, not politics. Sotheby's sold one for $3.65 million. Kunsthalle Zürich built a 2022 exhibition around the project. The political baggage is real, but it's a footnote, not the story.

Where to Buy Rare Pepes Today

The cards live as Counterparty assets on Bitcoin, so the cleanest way to buy them is on a marketplace that trades them in their native form.

Horizon Market is the main marketplace for Rare Pepes today. You can browse the full 1,774-card collection, see live floor prices, filter by series and supply, and buy or sell directly in Bitcoin. Trades settle on the Counterparty DEX, which means on-chain order matching and final settlement in Bitcoin blocks. No custodian holds the assets, and no platform takes a cut from artist sales. After Magic Eden shut down its Bitcoin marketplace in March 2026, Horizon is also the only marketplace where you can trade Rare Pepes alongside Bitcoin Stamps and Ordinals in one place.

To buy on Horizon, you need a Counterparty-compatible wallet (Horizon Wallet works, or any Counterparty-aware option) and Bitcoin to spend. Connect, fund, browse, buy. The card lands in your wallet as a Counterparty asset on Bitcoin and stays there until you sell or transfer it.

Wrapped on Ethereum. Many collectors wrapped their Pepes into ERC-721 tokens using Emblem Vault, starting in 2020. Wrapped Pepes trade on OpenSea and other Ethereum marketplaces. You can "crack" a vault to retrieve the underlying Counterparty seed phrase and reclaim the native Bitcoin asset. The wrapped supply is limited; original Counterparty cards on Bitcoin remain the canonical version.

Auctions and OTC. High-value cards sometimes appear at Sotheby's, Christie's, or community-run auctions on rarepepes.com. The biggest sales tend to happen over-the-counter between collectors who know each other. If you're starting from zero, the practical path is: get a Counterparty wallet, fund it with Bitcoin, open Horizon Market, and start with a higher-supply card from a series you find visually or culturally interesting. Floor prices for entry-level cards are low. The expensive ones are expensive because they're scarce, historically significant, or both.

Why Rare Pepes Still Matter

Bitcoin NFT activity has consolidated since Magic Eden shut down its Bitcoin marketplace in March 2026. The Bitcoin NFT collector base is smaller than Ethereum's, but it skews older, more provenance-focused, and disproportionately interested in artifacts from the early Counterparty era.

Rare Pepes are the central artifact of that era. Every other major Bitcoin NFT category, including Bitcoin Stamps, SRC-20 and Ordinals, comes after Pepes and references them. CryptoPunks (June 2017), CryptoKitties (October 2017), Bored Ape Yacht Club (April 2021) all came after the first Rare Pepe was minted. The community that built Rare Pepe Wallet (Joe Looney, the Telegram moderators, and the artists who submitted the first cards) set most of the cultural and technical conventions that newer NFT projects inherited without realizing where they came from.

You can argue about which 2016 project was "the first NFT" depending on how you define the term. Counterparty assets predate the ERC-721 standard. Spells of Genesis predates Rare Pepes. Curio Cards launched in mid-2017. None of that takes anything away from what Rare Pepes did, which was prove that an open community of strangers could mint, curate and trade digital art at scale, on Bitcoin, before anyone was sure it would work.

It worked. The collection is closed. The cards are still on Bitcoin. Twelve years from now, they'll still be there.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many Rare Pepe cards exist? 1,774 unique cards across 36 official series. Series 1 through 35 each contain 50 cards. Series 36, the final series, contains 24. Card supplies vary from a single edition (only seven 1-of-1 cards exist in the entire collection) to one trillion editions for joke cards like PEPEREPUBLIC.

When was the first Rare Pepe minted? September 9, 2016, in Bitcoin block 428,919. The first card was RAREPEPE, also called the Nakamoto Card, issued by an anonymous user known as "Mike" in a supply of 300.

What is the most expensive Rare Pepe ever sold? PEPENOPOULOS, a 1-of-1 card minted in 2016, sold at Sotheby's on October 26, 2021 for $3.65 million. The Homer Pepe card sold for around $320,000 in March 2021 after originally selling for $39,000 in January 2018.

Are Rare Pepes the first NFTs? They're among the earliest. Spells of Genesis began issuing Counterparty-based trading cards in 2015 and is commonly credited as the earliest blockchain-linked NFT precursor. Rare Pepes were the first community-driven open-submission collection, and the first to develop a real secondary market with hundreds of artists and thousands of collectors. Both predate the ERC-721 standard on Ethereum by more than a year.

What blockchain are Rare Pepes on? Bitcoin. They were issued as Counterparty assets, which means each card is data embedded in a Bitcoin transaction. Some Pepes have been wrapped into Ethereum ERC-721 tokens via Emblem Vault for trading on Ethereum marketplaces, but the originals live on Bitcoin and can be reclaimed by unlocking the vault.

Who is Joe Looney? A developer who built Rare Pepe Wallet in 2016 by forking an existing Counterparty wallet. He didn't create the first card himself, but he built the marketplace that made the project usable for non-technical collectors and artists, and he co-founded the Rare Pepe Foundation that handled curation. He's widely cited as the godfather of crypto art.

How do I buy a Rare Pepe? You need a Counterparty-compatible wallet and Bitcoin to spend. From there, browse a marketplace that supports the Counterparty DEX. Horizon Market lets you view the full collection, see floor prices, and trade Pepes natively on Bitcoin. Alternatively, you can buy wrapped Pepes on OpenSea using Ethereum, though prices and supply differ from the Counterparty originals.

Is the Rare Pepe Directory still open for submissions? No. The official directory closed for new submissions in early 2018, in part because Bitcoin transaction fees made minting too expensive. The 1,774 cards in the directory are the complete official collection. Subsequent projects like Fake Rares and other Counterparty-based collections build on the format but are not part of the official Rare Pepe corpus.