(Series 21, Card 15, 100 card issuance)
(Minted June 11, 2017)
Available via:
Counterparty BTC dispenser @xchain.io
or wrapped ETH asset @opensea.io
The Rare Pepe Project
American artist, Matt Furie, introduced the character Pepe the frog in his 2005 comic “Boy’s Club”.
From its inception in 2005, Pepe the frog became a viral meme that quickly spread among the seedy underbelly of the internet.
A decade and thousands of memes later, internet trolls began collecting and claiming ownership over the images by watermarking them, referring to them as “rare” and warning others that ‘right-click’ saving them was theft.
Mock disputes over Rare Pepes and threats to “flood the market” with jpegs was a reflection of the ambiguity of perceived value in the art and financial markets.
The joke snowballed to a point where a collection of Rare Pepe jpegs were listed on eBay and the trolls rallied to artificially bid up the price to reach as much as $99,166 before being shut down.
By 2016, the pretend buying and selling of jpegs manifested into reality when savvy developers realized that crypto technology made it possible for Rare Pepes to become rare for real. Thus, the first legitimate Rare Pepes were minted on a layer of the Bitcoin blockchain, creating some of the earliest known NFTs in existence and were traded on the very first crypto art exchange, rarepepewallet.
By 2018, a live auction of Rare Pepes took place in New York City, attended by representatives of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, and Sotheby’s Institute of Art in the audience. By 2021, Sotheby’s launched an NFT art auction where a collection of Rare Pepes sold for over $3.6 million.
Pepe the frog may be both an unwitting as well as culpable bystander in the debate of whether he stands near good or evil. Even still, all of the division and discourse around what his image represents only serves to engrave his name more deeply into the origins of digital art & money and time has yet to determine what that story is all about. (more about the controversy here: ArtNet)
Shadilay,
🐸
Excerpt from Matt Furie’s “Boy’s Club”(2005)
Point.Emerging.Probably.Entering “Shadilay”(1986) – Ass.Art.Pepe