The first art collection on Ethereum.
Peperium is a Pepe-inspired art collection built on Ethereum and IPFS — 32 collectibles, mostly 1/1s and small editions, all created in 2017 and rediscovered in 2023.
Are you holding history?
Browse all 32 Peperium artworks below, all created in 2017, or enter an Ethereum address or ENS name to filter the collection down to what a wallet holds.
Series 1
19 cards · Mar–May 2017Series 2
13 cards · Aug–Oct 2017A little bit of
history
A pepe-inspired project named Peperium is announced: a decentralized meme marketplace and trading card game letting anyone create memes with Ethereum and IPFS. Its own token, RARE, pays creation and listing fees.
KFPEPE, the first Peperium card, is deployed on Ethereum.
The project fades during Series 2, leaving only 32 different collectibles behind. Traces survive in old Bitcointalk, Reddit and Ethereum forum threads.
Blockchain archaeologists bring Peperium back to life — rediscovering the contracts and the original artists and founders. IPFS metadata is restored for all 31 assets, but 17 of the images turn out wrong: 14 with incorrect hashes, 5 missing entirely.
Restored images go up for PEPERIUMCLASSIC and PEPESTENCIL.
Eleven more restored images follow: PEPETTE, PEPEGOLD, PEPEGOD, NEWPEPE, KINGRARE, BASEBALLPEPE, LORDRARE, ZENPEPE, PEPESTREET, PEPEZEUSLIGHT, and RUINSOFPEPE.
The final two images arrive — VAPORPEPE and GIGERPEPECITY — completing the restored set. GIGERPEPECITY later turns out to be a misprint, duplicating RUINSOFPEPE's artwork. Rediscovered pieces can now be wrapped to current NFT standards and traded again.
Etherscan confirms all Series 1 card contracts are now Verified.
The factory contract v1 is Verified.
The Series 2 card contracts and factory contract v2 are Verified.
Peperium was revolutionary in innovating a new way to connect decentralized artwork to a token. These pieces are now known to be some of the earliest historical NFT collectibles in existence — Series 1 predates both ENS and CryptoPunks, and its first 10 cards predate Curio Cards. For a detailed overview, see this spreadsheet.
The paper trail
Cross-chainUNDEADPEPE — a controversial resurrection
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UNDEADPEPE — a controversial resurrection
A very controversial rare — rejected, revised, rejected, and revised again. Destroy your XCP UNDEADPEPE and resurrect it on the Ethereum blockchain. 84 have been resurrected so far.
Each Counterparty burn increases the circulating Ethereum supply by one. Burned ETH-side supply is held in a project wallet for the next destroyer. The bridge is one-way: an Ethereum UNDEADPEPE cannot be destroyed to mint a Counterparty one.
How the resurrection works
Destroy the asset using Freewallet with a memo like this:
Username-xxxx or ENS- Your username and the last four of the ETH wallet that should receive the Peperium.
- Or your ENS if it is short enough — the memo field is too small for a full ETH address.
Join the discord and reach out with the tokenscan transaction id and the matching ETH address. We will take it from there.
Technical
The RARE token, verified on Etherscan. Each card's own contract, balance, and lock status is on its page in the Artworks section above.
The RARE token
RARE was created alongside the project as the currency for buying cards. From the original whitepaper:
"The RARE token will serve as a base currency for meme creation and exchange on Ethereum. The supply will be initially 100 Million and to preserve the rarity and value of this token, beginning April 20th, 2017, there will be weekly burns of 1,000,000 RARE over a period of 79 weeks, until 21,000,000 RARE are in total circulation."
The first RARE token (R$) had a number of issues, later resolved by the legendary "bookypoobah". The new RARE token was deployed and holders were airdropped the same amount. RARE has no utility as of today.
Card art
The RARE token has its own card design, a little like PEPECASH. It's original image is on IPFS since 2017.