jan 13, 2018 - HOMERPEPE - $39,200

Description:

This sale for HOMERPEPE is one of the more well known and well documented sales in Counterparty history. This sale was at the first live in-person digital collectible auction at the Rare Digital Art Festival event in 2018 (also called RAREAF) and the auction was conducted by MemeConscious.

Many well known digital collectible pioneers attended, such as Joe Looney (Rare Pepe Wallet), Shaban Shaame (Spells of Genesis), Mack Flavelle (Crypto Kitties), Bea Ramos (Dada), Matt Hall (CryptoPunks), Kieran Farr (Decentraland) and many others. There is still a video record of the last moments of this auction on Isabel Draves's Youtube page. HOMERPEPE was sold for 350,000 PEPECASH to Peter Kell, which at the time was worth $39,200.

This was also the highest sale of any cryptocurrency asset/card/token in the entire crypto space (and HOMERPEPE wasn't even called an 'NFT' at the time). What is super interesting about this sale is the Peter Kell and another bidder both walked on stage thinking their highest bid was the winning bid due to confusion and how loud the auction room was. Peter Kell mentions in an interview by 'The Bitcoin Express' that the other bidder and Peter literally flipped a coin for which bidder would win the HOMERPEPE at the RAREAF auction.

This coinflip and more details from the event are best described by Daniel Penny of the Paris Review in his article 'How Much for That Pepe? Scenes from the First Rare Digital Art Auction.' After this sale, Peter Kell was also interviewed in the well known Pepe documentary titled 'Feels Good Man' by Arthur Jones.

Another interesting cultural point about this sale is that Yahoo News published an article by Rachel Kraus titled: 'Frightening Pepe/Homer Simpson trading card sells for a ridiculous amount'. The tone in Yahoo media articles about this subject might be due to a different socio-political atmosphere of news organizations around anything 'Pepe' related after the 2016 US presidential election.

Despite this press coverage, this sale would add an incredible amount of fuel and credibility to the sale of Counterpary assets and crypto related digital collectibles in general.

Just four years later in 2022, Yahoo's publishing tone would change drastically during their coverage of the Natively Digital 1.2: The Collectors' auction from Sotheby's.

Issuer: 1JAuET9GmkADQarX5ZsgHXuHjJzwesfAKg

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