PRINTING PEPE

“We wanted to link the digital rareness of PEPETSHIRT with physical merch and ended up creating the first NFT with utility; the first NFT redeemable for physical merch.”

In mid-2016 a team was formed which included Ashe Oro, GusGrillasca, and Lord Kekomoshi with the goal of creating the first utility NFT for the RarePepe NFT series (although the term NFTs didn’t exist back then). Little did we know this would be the first-ever NFT with real utility (that we’re aware of).

Since Ashe ran CryptoShirts.io at the time, the team decided to create PEPETSHIRT, which was redeemable for 1 free “Be Rare Be Pepe” t-shirt, exactly as it was drawn on the NFT. The PEPETSHIRT NFT was minted at Bitcoin block 435,012 on Oct 19, 2016, using Counterparty.

We wanted to link the digital rareness of PEPETSHIRT with physical merch and ended up creating the first NFT with utility; the first NFT redeemable for physical merch.

Once purchased, the NFT owner could go to CryptoShirts.io/RarePepe to redeem the free shirt. The instructions were very simple: transfer the NFT to our burn address and submit your email address. Once verified, we’d send you a 100% off code for the “Be Rare Be Pepe” t-shirt redeemable at Printful.

Knowing that holders didn’t want to simply burn their NFTs, once burned we’d send them a GOTPEPESHIRT NFT as proof of ownership of the physical Pepe t-shirt. We believe this is the first use of an NFT to show proof of action and to be used as a receipt.

Both the PEPETSHIRT and GOTPEPESHIRT cards were included in the Rare Pepe series 8 as cards #1 and #2, respectively. At the time, Pepe was just becoming a popular meme, and we ended up minting far too many (10,000), but the Pepe meme is as strong as ever, and we’ll see what the future holds for our dear Pepe.