So I had the opportunity to interview John Villar recently, one of the co-founders of the Pepecash — yes the green frog is into Bitcoin too — and core developer of Counterparty (XCP).
What’s Counterparty you ask? think of as an ERC20 token platform, but cheaper and more secure, aka on top of Bitcoin. More on that in a bit.
(Special thanks to Labitconf 2017, for bringing such amazing people to this year’s conference in Bogota Colombia, more to come)
John Villar is a Venezuelan crypto full stack engineer that got into Bitcoin in 2011 with the wave of mining that has brought a second wind to the country's depressed economy.
Since then he has emerged as a very active developer in a subgroup of crypto that is seldom talked about, Counterparty.
Counterparty is a layer two protocol that has been in active development on top of Bitcoin since before Ethereum was a thing. It is a child project of what used to be colored coins, the idea that one could tokenize certain Bitcoin addresses or give Bitcoins a kind of meta meaning.
The idea has since evolved into what we know today as tokens, crypto ‘currencies’ independant from the host blockchain’s bitcoin or ether, which can represent something else.
In the case of John Villar, that something else are rare Pepes.
That’s right, you’ve probably heard of it, turns out there’s a full sub culture within crypto fans of Pepe artists, pepe lovers, pepe traders and pepe collectors!
(I myself have a few I’m quite proud of, which you’ll see all over this article).
That’s right people make memes, create a token for them ontop of XCP and trade them!
Why you ask? well that’s like asking why people pay millions of dollars for da Vinci art and why they keep it behind top security vaulted museums.
What ever impressions you might have of this odd green frog post the Trump vs Hillary election and all the very entertaining drama that came with it, it is undeniable that there’s something special about this malleable and chaotic green frog.
It can be anything you want it to be.
Meme magic, its real. Got some?
Well enough people got some that it is becoming a bit of an economy. And like
Villar and his team are developing an indie card trading game, similar to magic the gathering, Pokemon trading cards, Yugioh or Hearthstone.
The game has been under development for over a year and standards for fair card powers among other things will also become a thing.
This is a Meme magic charged, user created content based trading card game.
And guess what, at some point, when it is ready, you’ll be able to bet crypto against your opponent.
You’ll only be able to play cards you own the crypto asset to in certain game modes, and it is going to be epic.
This, if you didn’t know is what Rarepepecash is all about.
Check out their flagship game site rarepepe.party for more info on their master plan.
The Pepecash token is meant to be the native currency of this whole ecosystem.
This is one of my favorite cryptos, in part because it is not that serious, and in other because it really is.
Counterparty blockchain.info style wallets.
Rare Pepe crypto related card directories.
Rare Pepe Cash and card wallet, which lets you see and trade the tokens against XCP and Pepecash.
Step by step guide on how to create an XCP token and thus a hopeful Pepecash Card
A rare Pepe youtube channel with some really funny content
And! The have their own magazine too…
Last but not least, the game’s flagship website, where you can find the links to the Telegram groups.
But, it’s not all peachy in Rare Pepe land . . .
The fees are too damn high!
Of course, like with everything actually being used in crypto these days…
Bitcoin transaction (tx) fees have skyrocketed in recent months. While they are not nearly as high as the worst critics will allude to, it still costs atleast 3 USD to get your tx in withing 2–3 days.
So maybe you can wait that long, maybe you can’t. If you want it now, you’ll have to pay 10 dollars, more then a decent amount of these cards actually trade for. (Though some are worth hundreds of USD now).
The good news? some major scalability upgrades are coming to XCP, the protocol on top of which Pepecash is built.
One of them which Villar is working on is called a multi party asset send Counterparty Improvement Proposal, or CIP 10.
This could add a 10 fold scalability to the protocol. Other improvements of the sort are coming as well, including support for the Segwit layer of Bitcoin.
It costs about 5 dollars, maybe 10 USD at current tx costs to create a token ontop of XCP with Bitcoin’s security. Unlike ERC20 tokens which can easily cost 5k USDfor a proper developer, and though they come with Turing completeness, they also come with higher security risks.
Sure, XCP it’s still no where near as easy to use as Ethereum is, but that’s not saying a lot. We are all still deep in geek land here.
However, given what XCP is capable of today, it seems to me to be a project and possibility people might want to become aware of.
Venezuela Petrocoin
Last but not least Maduro’s Petrocoin. …
That topic is well… it’s going to be interesting to watch and John Villar has been asked by the Venezuelan government to play a role, you’ll want to hear what he had to say about the topic during out interview. There’s a small window of hope, which could change Venezuela and really, financial geopolicial history forever.
Please let me know what you think, :)
… oh yes, shameless plug and you can send me rare Pepes here :D tnx, 1EQgSWHNZZ2q9VbJDUMwejTMvVPhzVftrD
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