The Rare Pepe Scientists are the people who decided what counted. They're a small, rotating group of volunteer curators who reviewed every submission to the directory between late 2016 and the directory's eventual taper. They were never paid, they had no formal authority beyond what the community granted them, and their decisions effectively defined the canon of Rare Pepes.

"Scientists" is an in-joke that stuck. The early Telegram chats had a running riff about "rare Pepe scientists" examining submissions under microscopes to determine rarity, and the label transferred to the actual review group when one needed to exist. It's the kind of thing that's funny if you were there and slightly opaque if you weren't, which is a fair summary of most Rare Pepe culture.

Why a curation layer was needed

Counterparty doesn't have any concept of "official Rare Pepe." Anyone can issue a Counterparty asset, name it whatever Counterparty's rules allow, and put a Pepe image with it. The protocol won't stop you. So in technical terms, "Rare Pepe" can mean anything anyone wants it to mean.

This is a problem if you want a coherent collectible market. Without some authoritative answer to "which Pepe-related Counterparty assets actually count," the entire collection collapses into noise. Anyone can mint a Pepe-themed asset; without curation, all Pepe-themed assets become Rare Pepes, which means none of them are.

The Scientists existed to draw the line. The line they drew was the directory: if your card was accepted into the directory, it was a Rare Pepe. If it wasn't, it was a Counterparty asset with a frog on it.

How a submission worked

The basic flow stayed consistent across most of the directory's active period.

An artist would design a card. The standard format was 400 × 560 pixels (vertical), featuring Pepe in some recognizable form. The artist would issue the card as a named Counterparty asset, choosing a supply (one-of-one, small editions, large editions, whatever they wanted), and paying the XCP fee for the named asset issuance. At that point the card existed on Bitcoin but was not yet a directory-recognized Rare Pepe.

The artist would then submit the card to the Scientists. This was done through whatever community channel was active at the time: initially the Telegram, later supplemented by submission bots and forms on rarepepes.com and adjacent sites. The submission included the card image, the asset name, the supply, and a PEPECASH fee.

The PEPECASH fee was small but meaningful. It served two functions. First, it filtered out completely unserious submissions. Second, it gave the Scientists a tangible signal that the artist valued directory inclusion enough to commit some PEPECASH to the attempt. The fee structure varied across the directory's life but was always denominated in PEPECASH, which kept the economic activity within the community currency.

The criteria

The Scientists' review criteria were never formally codified into a single document, but the working standards were:

  • Pepe must be meaningfully present. A card that just had a tiny Pepe in the corner wasn't a Rare Pepe. The character had to be a central element.
  • The artwork had to clear a minimum effort threshold. Lazy submissions (a Pepe on a generic background, low-effort traces, obvious filter-driven derivatives) got rejected.
  • It couldn't be a near-copy of an existing card. Variants and homages were fine. Outright duplicates weren't.
  • Format conventions had to be respected. The 400 × 560 aspect ratio, the card-like presentation, the visual language of trading cards.
  • The supply and pricing decisions had to be reasonable. Editions of millions wouldn't fly. Stunt supplies (1 of 0, named issuances that violated community norms) wouldn't either.

The criteria evolved. Early in the directory's life the bar was lower because the conventions were still being established. By the time Series 20 was in progress, the standards had tightened. By Series 30+, the Scientists were more rigorous because the community wanted the later series to feel as considered as the early ones.

Decentralization, sort of

"Decentralized curation" is a phrase that gets used a lot in NFT discussion and usually means voting with tokens. The Scientists weren't that. They were a small, mostly self-selected group of community members who took on the labor of reviewing submissions because someone had to.

This is closer to how most volunteer-run institutions actually work, online and off. The decentralization wasn't in the voting; it was in the absence of any single authority. No company owned the Scientists. No foundation paid them. Their authority to curate came from community consensus that they were the right people to do it, and that consensus could shift. Scientists rotated in and out. Decisions were sometimes contested.

The system worked because the stakes were proportional to the labor. Curating Rare Pepes was a side project for everyone involved. The directory wasn't anyone's livelihood. That made the Scientists harder to capture and easier to walk away from when the energy moved elsewhere.

What got rejected

The rejection pile is its own historical artifact, though much of it isn't well-documented. Common rejection reasons:

Copies and near-copies of existing cards. Artists sometimes resubmitted derivative work hoping the Scientists wouldn't notice. The Scientists usually did.

Low-effort filter art. Pepe + Instagram filter + generic background was a regular submission type and a regular rejection.

Submissions that were really just promoting a different project, with Pepe attached as a vector. The Scientists pushed back on this regularly, since accepting marketing cards into the directory would have diluted everything.

Cards that violated the format conventions in ways that suggested the artist hadn't actually looked at any existing Rare Pepes before submitting.

Some rejected submissions are still on Counterparty. They exist as assets, they can be traded, but they're not in the directory and the community doesn't treat them as Rare Pepes. Most of them have effectively no liquidity. The directory was where the market actually formed.

The model

The Scientists are a small but instructive example of how curation can work in an otherwise permissionless system. The underlying protocol (Counterparty) doesn't care what anyone calls anything. The market cares what the community decides counts. The Scientists were the mechanism through which the community made those decisions.

This pattern, where a permissionless layer is paired with a curation layer maintained by volunteers, recurs throughout open-source and crypto culture. The Scientists didn't invent it. But the Rare Pepe directory is one of the earliest cases of it being applied to digital art, and the model holds up better than most of the more elaborate governance schemes that followed. The marketplaces serving rare pepes today still defer to the directory because the directory's authority is, in practice, the community's authority.