They say it happened in one night.
I say it was years in the making.
2016.
Before the DeFi farms, before the memecoin frenzy, there was a backwater protocol called Counterparty.
Hardly anyone cared about it… until the frogs moved in.
It started with a few hand drawn Pepes digital trading cards, minted as if they were treasures from another timeline.
The kind of thing only deep net dwellers knew how to find.
Then the dam broke.
Overnight, the swamp flooded with Rare Pepes.
Pixelated. Painted. Glitched.
Some with laser eyes.
Some with Satoshi’s face.
Some so strange you’d think they came from another chain entirely.
Traders scrambled for the rarest ones cards with only a handful minted.
Prices climbed, screenshots flew, Discords burned with FOMO.
But in the chaos, whispers started… about one Pepe that never hit the market.
A phantom card.
Minted.
Locked away.
Its address unspent, its image unseen.
Some say it was lost in a wallet backup that never made it to the cloud.
Others say it sits in cold storage, waiting for the final meme cycle.
That night, a thousand Pepes were born.
But one stayed in the shadows.
