I'm Samadhi. Some of you knew me as RarePepeNews, and then as RarePepeTrader.
I ran WTH Auction House from January 2017 to October 2024 — the longest-running NFT auction group on Telegram. Before that I was posting articles as Rare Pepe News. In 2018, I co-founded Blockchain Sydney and in 2021 I started NFT Sydney (one of two groups by that name).
I still hold one of the larger Rare Pepe collections myself — which matters here mainly because I've spent as long on the buying side of this market as the selling side.
I've been around Counterparty since July 2016, joining Rare Pepe group soon after the first cards were issued. Went through all the ups and downs of the auctions, the long stretches when almost nobody was paying attention, and the short ones when suddenly everybody was. In October 2022 I went to HNFT in Barcelona and met a lot of the key people in our community in person, artists, builders, curators. You are my tribe, you're not an abstraction to me.
KEK 777 exists because of something that bothered me for most of that time.
There has always been individually produced Rare Pepe merch since the start of Rare Pepes. Redbubble, Etsy, print shops nobody can name. Whether any of the merch merchants ever paid an artist, I genuinely don't know — I'd like to think some did.
What I do know is that in ten years I never saw anyone set it up properly and say so out loud: ask the artist first, credit them by name, publish the terms where anyone can read them, pay them a share. And I'd probably have heard, because for a good stretch of that I was the one writing the news.
So that's what this is. Counterparty artwork printed with the artist's permission, credited to them by name, with 20% of net revenue on every item going to the person who drew it. Net revenue means what you paid for the product, less discounts, refunds, shipping and tax — not "profit", nothing else comes off. If an artist would rather it went to someone else, it goes there. If they want the whole thing pulled, one message and it's pulled, no argument and no lawyer.
We don't touch the pixels.
Every card is printed from the artist's original file at whole-number scale — 1×, 2×, 3× — so a pixel becomes a clean square block and nothing is invented. No upscaling, no smoothing, no "enhancement", no redraws, no tracing.
That rule costs us something, and it's worth being honest about what. A 400×560 card can only go so big before it drops under print resolution, which is why the card on a shirt is 2.67 by 3.73 inches and not the size of your chest. We could make it bigger by letting software guess at detail that was never there. We don't. Small and right beats big and smoothed.
Of course, if you have higher resolution artwork of your Counterparty creations, we can absolutely work with that.
On AI, since somebody will ask.
I built this shop with AI. The site, the product pages, the pipeline that turns a card into a print file and a finished listing — all of it made with Claude, by one person. That's the only reason a shop this small can do any of this properly.
I also build and guide AI augmented companies for a living, which is precisely why I'm careful about where it goes near somebody else's artwork. Knowing what these tools can do is the same thing as knowing what they shouldn't be pointed at.
What AI does not touch is the art. Not the upscaling, not the composition, not a single pixel of anybody's card. The artwork goes in as the artist made it and comes out the same, enlarged by whole numbers and nothing else.
That line — what gets touched and what doesn't — is the entire point of this shop. I'd rather tell you exactly where it sits than have you wonder.
The legal bit
KEK 777 is operated by Business Marketing Systems Pty Ltd (ACN 139 675 559, ABN 25 139 675 559), Sydney, Australia.
Not affiliated with, endorsed by or sanctioned by anybody. Like Bitcoin itself, or issuing an asset on Counterparty, there's nobody to be sanctioned by — which is rather the point.
Just licensed from the artists, one at a time.
Find me at t.me/SamadhiSpeaks. If you made a Counterparty card and want it on merch, the terms are here and they're short.