Rare Pepes by Joe Looney

According to Jason Bailey, 2016 saw the introduction of the first community NFTs. These communities formed during what, in hindsight, was a bear market throughout 2016 for wider crypto currencies.

This shift towards a communal focus was an incredibly important step that would ignite future interest and price acceleration. To this day, many associate NFTs with communities and memes, which is essentially when that association began thanks to the Meme Economy and Rare Pepe Wallet by Joe Looney. Still Bitcoin-focused, as “NFTs” on Ethereum did not exist, the Rare Pepe project began in the Counterparty Telegram chat. Counterparty is a peer-to-peer financial platform built on Bitcoin.

An anonymous user posted the first Rare Pepe, featuring Satoshi Nakamoto, and offered it for sale on the decentralized exchange, predicting it could be worth millions. Enthusiasts quickly joined, buying and creating their own Rare Pepes. The project grew rapidly, leading to the development of a dedicated wallet to view and trade these digital cards: the Rare Pepe Wallet. This wallet, according to Bailey, would go on to heavily influence Known Origin and SuperRare. Beyond contributing to early NFT and blockchain infrastructure, Rare Pepes, combining meme culture with blockchain technology, became a key use case of digital art as collectibles, influencing the rise of NFTs and the broader crypto art movement. So influential were Rare Pepes and the wallet that Bailey says: “Joe invented the future.”