The builder

John Villar — on-chain and online as “Chiguireitor” (@johnvillarz) — was a full-stack engineer from Venezuela who had been in Bitcoin since the early days. He was a core Counterparty developer, author of protocol improvement proposals, a co-founder of Pepecash, and ran a development studio in Caracas. In a community full of pseudonymous traders, John was one of the people quietly keeping the actual machinery running.

Petro, and a card called PEPETRO

Living in Venezuela through its economic collapse put John close to one of crypto's strangest chapters: the Petro, the state cryptocurrency the Maduro government launched in 2018. John was publicly engaged with that story — consulted and courted for it, and vocal about privacy tech in the same breath.

His comment on it lives on-chain forever as a Rare Pepe: PEPETRO (Series 33), a Pepe/Petro pun minted from his own wallet on 7 February 2018— days before the real Petro went live. We know it's his because the same address minted CHIGUIREITOR, the card he named after himself.

The game he was building

John's great unfinished work was rarepepe.party — a playable Rare Pepe trading-card game in the spirit of Magic: The Gathering and Hearthstone, cards wagered and battled on-chain. He designed two whole card sets for it — Series 18 and Series 19, the game's starting decks, described by later sellers as “the sole artistic brainchild of the late John Villar.” Community members sent him cards to fold into the decks; he could only ever dispense a couple hundred of each, and some were never distributed at all. The game never launched.

After

John died on 8 March 2021. It was a double blow to the studio — his father, also part of the company, passed around the same time. His brother, Javier Varona Zavatti, took up the unfinished work: recovering the game's accounts, and — with fellow Scientist JDog — helping keep the Counterparty protocol alive for years afterward, until Adam Krellenstein and a renewed team returned to maintain it in January 2024.

There is a quieter chapter, too. For more than a year after his death, access to John's own wallet was lost — freezing many of his cards and, poignantly, driving their prices up as they became unobtainable. Javier eventually recovered the keys from John's phone and began carefully releasing the cards, and returning some creators' assets to them on request.

The memorial

The community marked his passing on the chain he helped build. A commemorative token, VILLAR (an edition of 250), was placed in a dispenser with its sales forwarded to his family, and the Scarce City auctions of his Series 19 deck direct half of their proceeds to them as well. A burn-address shrine was created so anyone could still send him a token of appreciation:

1JohnViLLARchiguireitorxxxxwhsz7P