An archive, not a content site.
rarepepe.cloud is an editorial archive of Bitcoin's first NFT movement: Rare Pepes, the Counterparty community that made them possible, and the people who built the wallets, currencies, and verification systems that turned a Telegram chat into a working art market.
Most of what's been written about NFT history was written by people who arrived after 2021. The result is a thin, repetitive narrative that mostly traces back to CryptoPunks and Ethereum, with Rare Pepes occasionally name-checked as a curiosity. The actual history is more interesting, more documented, and considerably older than the standard account suggests.
This site exists to collect that history from the people and places where it actually happened.
Sourcing principles
Every piece on this site is footnoted at the bottom with its primary sources. Where claims appear in articles, they're traceable to one of three things: an interview with a named participant, contemporary writing from inside the community at the time, or the technical record from the Counterparty protocol itself.
Things this site avoids: secondhand summaries of secondhand summaries; rehashes of generic NFT explainers; uncited "first ever" claims; and AI-generated filler. Where a claim is contested or unclear, it gets hedged or left out.
Scope
The archive covers Rare Pepes specifically and the surrounding Counterparty ecosystem where it intersects with Rare Pepe history. Coverage includes the 2016 origin story, the technical mechanics, key figures (Joe Looney, the Rare Pepe Scientists, notable artists), individual cards with sales history, PEPECASH, the directory series, and the relationship between Rare Pepes and other Bitcoin NFT protocols that came later.
What this site is not: a marketplace, an investment guide, a current-events feed, or a Pepe-the-Frog general interest blog. The character of Pepe outside its use in the Rare Pepe cryptoart community is out of scope.
Publication cadence
New articles get published when the research on them is finished, not on a content calendar. Forthcoming pieces are listed on the articles page as they're in progress.
Corrections
If something on this site is factually wrong, it gets corrected. If you have evidence of a factual error, a missing primary source, or a misattribution, the right move is to point at the contradicting source. Corrections will be noted on the article in question.