The genesis (September 2016)

In September 2016 a pseudonymous figure known only as “Mike” began issuing Pepe trading cards as assets on Counterparty — a protocol that had let anyone mint tokens on Bitcoin since 2014. The genesis card, RAREPEPE, dates to 9 September 2016; the earliest cards — RAREPEPE, GOXPEPE and SHITCOINCARD — later became the base for the PEPECASH airdrop that would fund the whole economy.

Mike & the Directory

To keep the flood of submissions coherent, Mike built the Rare Pepe Directory — the registry that would ultimately certify 1,774 official cards across 36 series. For roughly the first 1,000 cards Mike was the sole curator — the only “Rare Pepe Scientist” — before the curation expanded, in late 2016, to a committee of seven. His real-world identity has never been documented, and we don't assert one.

(The full roster — Mike, Joe Looney, John Villar, Shawn Leary, Theo Goodman, JDog and Wade — gets its own page in the wiki.)

The rules

The Directory's submission rules were short and strict. A card had to:

• feature Pepe, be original, and be a 400×560px image;
• be non-divisible and have its issuance locked (so supply could never be inflated);
• have an issuance of at least 100 and at most 100,000 shares;
• pay a submission fee in PEPECASH — one submission per day.

The 100-minimum existed for a reason the Directory stated plainly: some people were trying to mint “whole new currencies” instead of collectible trading cards. A floor of 100 kept the cards cards.

The fault line the rule left behind

That rule wasn't there on day one — and the ledger shows exactly when it took hold. Of the 1,774 cards, precisely 62 were issued below 100 shares. Every single one falls in Series 1–4, minted between 9 September and 6 October 2016. The last card ever admitted with a sub-100 supply was PEPEALASSAD (issued 3) on 6 October 2016. From Series 5 onward, not one card dips below 100 — and every one of the 1,622 cards minted after that date respects the minimum, without a single exception.

The Wallet (2016)

None of it would have scaled without a way to actually trade the cards. In 2016 Joe Looney built rarepepewallet.com — the first commission-free, on-chain wallet and marketplace for Rare Pepes, letting anyone buy, sell, gift, and even destroy cards using PEPECASH or XCP. Jason Bailey (Artnome) would later call it “the birth of CryptoArt.”

The first auctions (October 2016)

By October 2016 there was a market — and an auctioneer. Theo Goodman ran live, roughly-weekly Monday auctions in the Rare Pepe trading Telegram group, all bids in XCP (“do not ask if you can pay in other shitcoins”), run in the classic cadence: “Going once, going twice, going three times, SOLD.” The earliest archived transcript is 10 October 2016; a single LORDKEK went for 44 XCP that night, nine TECHNOPEPE for 75.

Sources: the Rare Pepe Directory rules; the Book of Kek wiki; Artnome; and the primary auction transcripts on RarePepeNews. See the full Lore & Sources bibliography.