Joe Looney is a mechanical engineer. He didn't create the first Rare Pepe, and he has said so in every interview he's given on the subject. What he did was build the tool that turned a Telegram chat in-joke into a working cryptoart market, ship a feature set in late 2016 that NFT platforms rediscovered around 2021, and take no commission while doing it.

Artnome's Jason Bailey called him the godfather of CryptoArt. The label fits less because of any first-mover claim Looney makes for himself and more because of what the Rare Pepe Wallet actually did. It was the first place where a non-developer could buy a tokenized piece of digital art on Bitcoin, look at it in a real interface, and resell it to someone else without a middleman taking a cut.

The wallet itself

The Rare Pepe Wallet launched in late 2016. It was a browser-based interface that sat on top of Counterparty and handled the protocol-level transaction construction so users didn't have to. From a single page, you could:

  • Buy a Rare Pepe from the Counterparty decentralized exchange
  • Sell a Rare Pepe you held by placing a DEX order
  • Transfer a Rare Pepe to another address
  • Issue editions of a new Rare Pepe (subject to community curation)
  • Gift a Rare Pepe via a generated gift card with a secret code
  • Destroy a Rare Pepe by sending it to a verifiably unspendable address

The wallet didn't take a commission on any of it. Anyone could submit artwork for inclusion in the directory, choose any supply, and set any price. The wallet handled the underlying Counterparty transactions; the user saw a wallet of cards.

The "anyone can submit, the platform doesn't take a cut" model now sounds standard. In late 2016 it was not how the rest of the digital art market worked, and it predated the Ethereum NFT marketplaces that would later popularize the same approach. By the time of Bailey's January 2018 Artnome piece, the Rare Pepe community had cleared over $1.2 million in sales through the wallet, none of which went to a platform fee.

Gift cards and the assumption that fees would stay low

One feature is worth pulling out: gift cards. You could send a Rare Pepe to a freshly generated Bitcoin address and encode the private key as the gift card's redemption code. The recipient could redeem the card by sweeping the address. Looney designed them to look like physical cards in the wallet interface, with the Pepe in the middle and a decorated border.

He sent these around before Christmas 2016 with a card called SCHROEPEPE, which is both alive and dead and displays differently depending on what device shows it. The feature mostly stopped getting used once Bitcoin transaction fees climbed in 2017. As Looney has noted, the original design assumed Bitcoin would stay cheap to use. That assumption didn't hold, and several Rare Pepe Wallet features became impractical for a few years as a result.

It's a small artifact, but it tells you something about the design philosophy: the wallet treated digital scarcity not as a cold technical primitive but as something you could wrap, gift, and hand around like physical objects. Most NFT platforms that came later went the other direction, treating tokens as financial instruments first and artworks second.

Looney's account of starting

Looney is consistent in interviews that he didn't start the Rare Pepe project. "It actually started in the Counterparty Telegram," he told R.A.R.E Art Labs in 2018. "Somebody just came in, posted the Rare Pepe, the very first one, the Satoshi Nakamoto Pepe, and said, 'I have sell orders on the decks.'"

That somebody was Mike, who has been documented in the public record only as an early Counterparty user with the handle @nola1978. What Looney did was watch the cascade happen in the Telegram, recognize that the friction of issuing and trading Counterparty assets directly was going to limit how far this could grow, and build the wallet to remove that friction.

This pattern recurs in how Looney describes his role. He's the person who builds the tooling, not the person who builds the movement. He has been deliberate about giving credit to Mike, to the curators (the so-called Scientists, who handled submissions), and to the artists. The story of the Rare Pepe Wallet, told from his end, is the story of a developer responding to a community that already existed.

The hate-symbol question

Three days after Mike's first card, the Clinton campaign published its statement linking Pepe the Frog to alt-right imagery. Looney has talked about the timing more than once. The framing he uses: it was almost like, here's this awesome thing, let's do it, and then someone ruined Pepe.

The Rare Pepe community has consistently disavowed hate-symbol use of the character. Matt Furie created Pepe in 2005 for the comic Boy's Club, and the character was a general-purpose internet meme for a decade before Mike's card. The community's argument has been that the Rare Pepe project is a continuation of that broader Pepe culture, not the alt-right co-option that happened to coincide with the project's launch.

This isn't a position the Rare Pepe community needs to defend at length, and they generally don't. But it's part of Looney's biography in a way it wouldn't be for most software developers. He has dealt with it directly and has been clear about where he stands.

What came after

After Rare Pepe Wallet, Looney built Freeport, which Artnome described in early 2019 as an open-source toolkit for issuing and managing cryptoart on Counterparty. Freeport extended the wallet model: same no-commission ethos, same Bitcoin-anchored architecture, broader scope of what could be tokenized.

By the time of the 2021 NFT boom, Looney was an established figure in the Bitcoin cryptoart community without having moved to Ethereum. His public frustration in 2021 is worth noting. He watched CryptoPunks get branded as the originators of NFTs and pointed out, accurately, that his community had created the first NFTs years before the term existed. The brand recognition didn't follow the chronology.

Why the wallet still matters

The Rare Pepe Wallet still operates. The cards minted in 2016 still transfer through it. The same DEX it integrated with still matches orders. There has been no protocol migration, no token swap, no bridge to maintain. Newer Counterparty-aware marketplaces have since joined the wallet in serving the same on-chain assets; collectors today can move rare pepes through whichever interface suits them without the underlying tokens ever leaving Bitcoin.

Most NFT infrastructure from 2017 to 2019 either no longer works, has been deprecated, or requires migrating tokens to newer contracts. The Rare Pepe Wallet predates almost all of it and is still functional on the same chain it launched on. That's partly the architecture (Counterparty as a metaprotocol on Bitcoin) and partly the design choice to keep the tool minimal and not couple it to a business model that needed to keep growing.

Looney built something that didn't need a series A. It needed Bitcoin to keep working. So far Bitcoin has kept working.