Peter Kell Recounts The Story Of Buying ‘Homer Pepe,’ The Most Valuable Rare Pepe Ever, And How He Sold It For Over $300,000 Three Years Later

lthough NFTs and crypto art have been seemingly everywhere lately, just a few years ago, the scene was still in its infancy and largely written off. From CryptoPunks to CryptoKitties, the earliest forms of crypto-collectibles were once ignored by most, even mocked. When Rare Pepes came on to the scene around 2015 as a form of collectible Pepe the Frog NFTs, they too were sneered at — that is, until 2018 when one sold for nearly $39,000.

Peter Kell is the man who made this purchase three years ago while attending the first digital art auction of its kind in NYC. On a whim, he snagged a Rare Pepe called “Homer Pepe,” featuring a green Pepe-like Homer Simpson and a small typo on its digital card. After dropping tens of thousands of dollars on it, he was laughed at by many online who didn’t yet understand the crypto art world. In the end, Kell had the last laugh after selling Homer Pepe last weekend for a whopping $312,000. To hear more about this curious tale of NFT legend, before the recent hype had everyone scrambling to join the fray, we sat down with Kell who took us back to the day he first purchased it as he recounted everything in-between.

Q: Welcome, Peter. Thanks for joining us. Introduce yourself a bit to get us started here.

A: My name is Peter Kell and I’ve been an online marketer for the past 10 years. I’m just a regular guy who got into building brands, shooting infomercials and also crypto. I’m best known online for the Homer Pepe thing now.

Q: So before we jump up to more recent events, would you mind taking us back to some of your earliest days with the web? How’d you get into memes and internet culture?

A: So 10 years ago, I realized my dream of being a downhill skateboarder wasn’t going to create the life that I wanted. So, I moved back into my parents' basement and they lived in the middle of nowhere. I was kind of stuck in a situation where I had to figure out how to make money online as an internet marketer or else I'd be stuck in this basement in the woods forever. I couldn't get a job up there, so [I spent] two years in their basement trying to grind, figure out how to start a business that would help me go somewhere. I didn't really have any money after college.

That was kind of like my origin story into internet marketing in a sense and trying to make things happen. When it comes to memes and stuff, I actually never “got into memes” really. I was more of a normal guy who couldn't even figure out how to use 4chan. So I wasn't like a “4chan guy,” I just kinda fell into this in a weird way — definitely not like a “hardcore memer.” I was more so just a normal guy who was inspired by this idea of living that “laptop lifestyle” and becoming successful.

Q: Rare Pepes emerged in late 2014 and early 2015 on 4chan. When did you first become aware of them and how did you get involved in collecting them initially?

A: I got into crypto back in 2016 when I was living in the Caribbean. I had to send international wires all the time and started asking questions like, “Why does it take days for me to send wires? Why can’t I send wires on a weekend? Why can’t money just move like email?” All that didn’t make sense, and eventually, I concluded that this entire banking system was just built 30 to 40 years ago on old tech and there was an opportunity for complete disruption. Crypto started to really make sense to me back then.

I started YOLO investing in 2017 — just joining groups and throwing everything I owned into it. I was lucky enough to rub shoulders with some huge seven- and eight-figure crypto portfolio guys. I’d heard them talk about investing in PepeCash and I had no idea what that was, but huge people were talking about it. I’d go to the website and have no fucking clue what I was looking at, so I always wrote it off.

Q: So then in early 2018, you purchased the Homer Pepe NFT at the Rare Art Labs Digital Art Festival in NYC. Can you tell us more about this event and why you wanted this Rare Pepe in particular?

A: In January 2018, I found myself in a large investment of Counterparty and wanted to meet the developers to ask them a few questions about how things were going. I heard they were going to be at this event called “RareAF” in New York. It was going to be the first digital art auction in history and I thought, “Hell yeah. I’m going to talk to these guys and learn about this Rare Pepe stuff I never had any idea about.” So I flew out to New York and watched this event.

One by one, speakers would go on stage and talk about digital art. Through that, I started to understand that it’s not a picture, it’s what’s under the picture. It’s the thing under the picture. You can screenshot the picture all day long, but you’ll never get what’s underneath it. It made sense to me and I decided I wanted to get in. Also, there was a real feeling in the air that, since this is the first digital art auction ever, they were going to auction off something pretty spectacular. So I go up to Joe Looney, the founder of Rare Pepe, and ask him, “How do I know what’s a good digital art piece to get?” He’s like, “The less there are, the rarer it is, the more it’s worth.” Or something like that. “Look for the 1-of-1s.” They weren’t even called NFTs back then, just collectibles or crypto-collectibles. Back then they were selling CryptoPunks for like $200 or $50, now those turned out to be goldmines, but I thought those were kind of silly.

Finally, we get to the last one and it’s Homer Pepe. I fucking loved it. I grew up watching The Simpsons and this thing just spoke to my heart when I saw it. So then I got into this insane bidding war with this other guy who I actually knew from my industry, and he's rich, this is not a good guy to be in a fight against [laughs]. We start going back and forth, bidding starts to get super high, and every time we bid, the crowd just starts freaking out. After we get past the $10,000 range, the crowd just freaks out every time somebody says something.

Eventually, we got to $39,000 and everyone's freaking out. Then they go, “Going once, going twice, sold!” And I see him pointing at me and I'm like, “Oh my God, I just won this thing. I just won the Homer Pepe.” Then I go up on stage and then the other guy goes up on stage. He's like, “I thought I won,” cause it got so loud that no one could hear the other bid. So we're on stage wondering who gets to spend $39,000 on this picture, and we end up flipping a coin and I won the coin flip.

Q: [Laughs] damn that’s a crazy story. So what was the actual event like? What types of people attended and how high did the other crypto art get?

A: All crypto guys and some developers, very few investors, artists and a lot of people trying to figure out if this digital art scene would become a thing. I think the biggest bid [aside from Homer Pepe] was like $2,000.

Q: At the time, how confident were you in the value of Homer Pepe? Did you think it would be worth more down the line?

A: I mean, being at the event, since it was the first online auction for digital art, it really felt like they were going to give away something really special. I got laughed at for a long time after this purchase, but in my head, I was like, “I can't be the only one in the world to want this.” I had somebody say, “You're the dumbest person to buy this.” And I was like, “Well, I may be the dumbest person in the room, but am I the dumbest person on the planet?” I was pretty sure I could find someone that would buy this, and it ended up being a good idea.

Q: In last year’s documentary on Pepe, Feels Good Man, you were interviewed about the crypto-collectibles and showed off Homer Pepe. What was it like being a part of that documentary and did you notice any newfound interest in Rare Pepes after it released?

A: I was super stoked to be a part of the Feels Good Man documentary. When they reached out to me, I was super excited. For one, I kind of wanted to show off Homer Pepe. I wanted to get him on stage and position him as the “number one guy,” obviously for financial benefit, but there were other benefits like just getting the whole Rare Pepe scene out there. So I made this theme song, which was incredible, just to give back to the community. I made the Rare Pepe theme song that is just a rip-off of the Pokemon theme song and that was featured in the documentary, which I was super proud of.

So I’m thinking, “How am I going to show off this Homer Pepe?” The thing about the PepeCash scene is that it's all about like Lambos and “being alpha.” So I flew out to Vancouver and I'm like, “You know what, I'm going to get a T-shirt with Homer Pepe on it, I'm going to rent a Lambo and that's what we're going to be. We're going to put Homer next to a Lambo and we'll just roll with that.” I didn't really get anyone reaching out after the documentary was made and it came out. It was just radio silence. So I was like, “Ok, I guess there goes that investment down the hill, on to the next one.” But it was super cool and a funny moment.

Q: This brings us up to last weekend when you sold Homer Pepe for about $312,000. Why’d you decide to sell this collectible now and what was the experience like? Did you think it would get that high?

A: The NFT marketplace moves with Bitcoin. I like to think of it like this: When crypto booms and a bunch of idiots, like myself, have money, we buy silly things like NFTs or we buy things that are perceived to be silly, like NFTs. So it kind of moves with it. When crypto died, the whole thing died, so there was like a three-year gap where not much was happening. Recently, as of a month ago, the news is all over it. And NFTs now, I mean, you put the word “NFT” in a headline and everyone's reading it. So it just kind of hit me again like, “Oh my God, this is a thing again. It’s back!”

So then I see some prices of these CryptoPunks and I'm like, “This ‘Punk is $70,000? Jesus Christ. This is a little bit ‘bubbly’ in my feeling, a little bit overvalued, overpriced. This is a little crazy.” I definitely think ‘Punks are worth a lot and will be worth a lot in the future, but I don't know about that spike. That's pretty risky to me. So I was like, “You know what? I feel like we're in a bubble. I feel like this is a good opportunity to get back in. Let's see if we can sell Homer Pepe.” I looked at the Rare Pepe market and there's not much stuff happening in there. But there was kind of a feeling that we could do “the zapper” on the whole market with one big crazy sale.

I reached out to a good friend of mine that I had met at the auction three years ago, and he was like, “Dude, your Homer Pepe is worth like minimum $2 million now.” Jesus Christ. You're kidding me. So I said, “Yeah, maybe I'll try to put this up on an auction site for like a million bucks and see what happens.” I had a couple of guys out there looking around and then, lo and behold, somebody really wanted this Homer Pepe. My buddy Skrilla found a buyer, and we negotiated about it for a while and I kind of knew the value of what it could be worth, so I wasn't willing to let it go for less than what I thought was fair. Eventually, we had Joe loony, who made Rare Pepes, facilitate the transaction. I sent him the Homer, they sent me the money. Boom, done.

Q: Do you plan to continue collecting crypto art or meme NFTs after this or use the auction money to purchase any other meme-related crypto-collectibles?

A: I still have a handful of RarePepes in my wallet. Obviously, I really like being at the top. I think CryptoPunks are going to be gold. I'm a bit wiser this time around. You learn a lot when you're YOLO investing in crypto, and typically that doesn't always turn out super hot. So I have a different kind of plan. I'm really into just altcoins right now, but my plan is to get back into crypto art when maybe the bubble hits.

Q: With many people just now learning of NFTs, what do you think they’ll look like in the near future? Will the crypto art world continue growing and expanding in the near future?

A: I can see why it still gets pushback, but eventually, it won’t. It’s a lot like having a First Edition PSA 10 Charizard in a binder somewhere. Art and collectibles don’t just have to hang on walls. It's kind of a Dot-com bubble, but here we are still on the internet. So it's just going to pop and then go back up. But this is something that is going to resonate with the new generation, at least I think. It's the old people who aren't going to get it, and the young people are going to be all about it because the old people don't get it. If you think Picasso is for your dad, then this can be for you. Stocks were for my dad, crypto is for me. Art on the wall is super cool, but digital art feels like it's for me, you know?

Q: With the recent $600,000 sale of the Nyan Cat NFT and new meme-related NFTs being auctioned off in greater numbers lately, what do you think this means for memes and their creators as we enter a new decade of the internet?

A: One of the most fulfilling parts of selling Homer Pepe was getting to hear the stories of digital artists who were inspired to get into the space after my initial buy of Homer Pepe. So many people said “thank you” to me, which felt really good. I didn’t mean to inspire so many people, I just paid for it. I can’t believe it and am so grateful for the wave of positivity that came from this. They have an opportunity to create a great living doing what they love, become great respected, recognized, seen artists online. This is just more proof to the pudding — that they can actually do it. Other people are doing it, it's a new thing, and it's the future, right? You don't need massive wins to make a full-time living on this thing.

Watch our interview with Peter Kell below for the video version of our discussion.

Peter Kell is an online marketer based in the U.S. who made headlines in 2018 when he purchased the most valuable Rare Pepe card in existence and then sold it in March 2021 for $312,000. Kell also appeared in the 2020 documentary Feels Good Man. To see more, you can check out his Instagram account.