10 years ago, the first Rare Pepes appeared on Bitcoin. The idea of a "Rare Pepe" had already been circulating for nearly two years. In online forums, users created their own versions of Pepe, boasting that each one was rarer than the last. They added watermarks and exchanged them like trading cards. By 2015, Rare Pepes even appeared for sale on eBay and Craigslist. Then, on September 9, 2016, an anonymous artist known as Mike turned the concept of rarity into reality. Mike created three digital trading cards, including the iconic Nakamoto Card, and tokenized them through Counterparty, a protocol built on Bitcoin. For the first time, "rare" could be verified onchain. The experiment quickly became a community. @wasthatawolf created the Rare Pepe Wallet, giving people a place to collect, display and trade the cards, while artists from around the world began submitting their own designs. Volunteer "Rare Pepe Scientists" reviewed submissions as the project grew into a vast, community-created body of tokenized art. The cards drew on bitcoin, memes, politics, art history and the personalities of crypto culture itself. They were irreverent, collaborative and created by people who were building their own culture as they went. The rest is history. Feels good man.