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Pepe the Frog's decade-long journey from webcomic character to everyman meme to alleged hate symbol has been a topsy-turvy one, but his importance to the meme economy cannot be denied. The trope of trading and collecting "Rare Pepes," distinctive images of the famous frog, has been part of meme culture for years. And now there's real money behind it.

A February article from Reddit's Meme Insider, a parody trade publication dedicated to serious coverage of memes, explains how the fictitious market for Rare Pepesbecame a booming business.

The piece, by pseudonymous redditor JeffTheDunker, describes how the Rare Pepe economy initially functioned on a system of "Good Boy Points," a largely fictitious currency that people would trade for new and unique images of Pepe. It started out circa 2015 as a 4chan in-joke about an autistic kid who would exchange "Good Boy Points," earned by doing chores for his mom, for precious "chicken tendies," and somehow they became the dominant imaginary currency of the Rare Pepe economy.

Good Boy Points were unsustainable, though, because there was no accountability in the system: Anyone could fabricate their Good Boy Point totals. In short: the points just weren't real.

Additionally, the idea that there was valueeven imaginary or purely social valuein Rare Pepe memes caused the demand for Pepes to go up, and the market to become flooded by new content.

"When [Rare Pepes] breached mainstream media outlets, early adopters and speculators around the globe packed their bags for good, as the Pepe had, in their minds, become useless," JeffTheDunker explains in Meme Insider.

In early 2015, a poster on 4chan's /r9k/ board, incensed at the mainstream popularity Pepe was starting to enjoy, tried to kill the meme by distributing a collection of more than 1,200 Rare Pepes, labeled "the end is nigh, hope you cash out now."

4chan called this Pepe massacre "the Peppening," and it led to posters jokingly watermarking their best Rare Pepes "do not save":

The watermarks obviously did nothing to protect the Pepes, other than making them uglier, and the Rare Pepe economy looked doomed. But what if there were a way to regulate Pepes and make them impossible to copy?

We've seen Rare Pepestraded on Craigslistbefore, where physical drawings or printouts of the frog that were offered in exchange for cold, hard cashsometimes as much as $100. We've even seen them sell on eBay for nearly $100,000probably as a joke. But JeffTheDunker also suggests there's a real demand for unusual digital images of Pepe, even though it seems like those images should be trivial to replicate.

Enter: the blockchain. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin use it to make sure that digital money is unique to its owner and can't simply be copied or faked, and now it's being applied to Rare Pepes.

A blockchain-based platform called Counterparty lets users make anything into a unique digital token, and "anything" now includes Rare Pepes.

Traders can buy and sell the Pepes using Counterparty currency, but they prefer a cryptocurrency called PepeCash, which currently trades at 302 PepeCash to the dollar.

RarePepeWallet.com

RarePepeWallet.com

The universe of Rare Pepes is constantly expanding, too. There are already more than 500 distinct cards, and collectors cansubmit their ownoriginal Rare Pepes for consideration. All it takes is a payment of 4,000 PepeCash (roughly $13), a dank idea, and some design skills.

The rules for approval are stringent:

This manual approval process means none of the 1,200 compromised Pepes from the 2015 "Peppening" is likely to show up on the site. Some of them may still be dank, but they're no longer rare.

One thing you'll notice about the selection of Pepe cardsand the Rare Pepe trading community at largeis that they don't carry even a whiff of Pepe's status as an alt-right, white supremacist, pro-Donald-Trump icon.

"Most of the community don't think Pepe is an alt-right thing. Some (like me) think that we should Make Pepe Great Again and free him of that connotation," Pepe trading enthusiast Django Bates told the Daily Dot via email. "Also, you have to be aware that Pepe as a symbol of hate and racism by alt-rights is a merely North American thing. The rest of the world does not see Pepe in that context. But our Rare Pepe trading community is global. We have people from Japan, Spain, France, the U.S., Switzerland (myself), Russia, Turkey, South Africa and many other countries.

"Pepe is a meme. If alt-right idiots use it for there bullshit, then be it. Pepe is much greater and does not care about them. Pepe is a mirror. And a mirror is not racist, just because a racist is using it."

So, instead of Trumpist Pepes, you'll find card designs like My Little Pepe, which might be the most expensive Rare Pepe ever sold. It recently changed hands for 1 million PepeCash (currently about $3,300).

rarepepewallet.com

The proud owner of My Little Pepe, alias American Pegasus, told the Daily Dot, "Only one of these exist, and it belongs to a tier of the rarest pepes of all - uniques with only a single card issued."

rarepepewallet.com

"But that Pepe wasn't listed for sale in Counterparty," American Pegasus continued. "Instead the seller only would accept cold hard Pepecash. A million of them to be exact. And so I'm darn glad I had some handy, and was able to score the trade."

We're a long way from Good Boy Points now. The Rare Pepe economy is based on real money, and PepeCash is starting to take off. A recent price jump seems to have been triggered by a January Vice articleand an article Wednesday in France's Le Mondethat introduced Rare Pepe Wallets toa new group of meme fanatics.

Unlike most other digital currencies, this one is tied to the enthusiasm for an underlying product: Pepes. Even though you don't needPepeCash to buy Pepes, Pepe enthusiast find it nice to own for a number of reasons.

"Pepecash offers a fun and abstract way to value Rare Pepes apart from their underlying Counterparty value," American Pegasus explained. "As we know, with money, the value is in the utility. There are several exciting Pepecash-only features being planned, such as an entire exchange based off Pepecash and a Pepestarter crowdfunding platform. Ultimately it's best for the Pepeverse to have a highly liquid asset like this that can act as a base token for all things Pepe."

No matter how much money you dump into Rare Pepes, though, you'll never own them all. There are a handful of one-of-a-kind Pepes, and some of their owners may have lost the passphrases to their Pepe wallets or may never sell their precious rares.

"In what can be seen as a satirical jab at this growing [altcoin] culture, Rare Pepes create a metaphorical representation of the pump and dump absurdity and legitimizes it through the use of the Bitcoin blockchains immutability," Bitcoinist's Ryan Strauss wrote in November.

The people trading Rare Pepes and PepeCash don't see them as just another flash-in-the-pan alternative currency, though.

"I deeply believe that it is a lot more interesting as Dogecoin, which was only a currency," Bates told the Daily Dot. "This is not just a currency. It is Blockchain driven meme assets you really can own. It is also helping to develop Counterparty, the protocol that is used to create and trade these assets."

On the Rare Pepe Traders group chat, there's plenty of excitement about the PepeCash boom, but it's also clear that the traders and card creators have a passion for the meme.

"With pepetrading there are several things coming together as an extra: Memepower, Curiosity, Human nature of collecting all sorts of stuff, Hope for profit, Community, Interest in Blockchain Technology and above all - the lust to make fun about everything and everybody," Bates wrote. "It's the mix of it all."

One Rare Pepe designer, Nymity Nymz, told Le Monde,"I think these are just the beginnings of anindustry," and said it's even possible he could live on his Pepes someday.

Nymz, who described himself to RarePepeNews.com as a "Rapper, Ghost writer, FinTech Guru,"also told the site that the reason he creates Rare Pepes is "for 2020."

A Rare Pepe, he said, "is something that has the potential to outlive us all."

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The Rare Pepe economy is real, and there's serious money behind it - The Daily Dot