I’m Dan Anderson, and I prefer my memes tokenized.

21e14 is a reference to the number of bitcoin sats that will be mined. And it's the brand name or UMBRELLA I put my sites under that I've built to showcase the value of Counterparty and its community.

And I owe the Counterparty community a lot. After all, I live in a home that their memes paid for. (That's saying something in this economy.)

Counterparty

I first heard about Counterparty in 2014 when it was a Top 10 Coin, but it wasn’t until 2015 that I truly dove in — running a node, hosting a wallet, and registering 1,000 assets because I saw the potential for blockchain asset names to become valuable like domain names.

Ethereum mainnet had not yet been launched, ENS was years off — at the time, Namecoin was the point of reference — and Vitalik Buterin could be found loitering in Counterparty chatrooms on Skype.

People were asking, "Now that we have blockchains, what can we do with them?" Counterparty was one team's answer to that question: "Maybe what blockchains can do is minimize counterparty risk."

Early Days

The anonymous co-founders created a protocol for trustlessly trading assets onchain. They launched it fairly, built it on Bitcoin to enhance it (when it was more popular to build Bitcoin forks), and it worked.

But it was early. Bitcoin devs shunned the metaprotocol as SPAM and a danger to the economic incentives of Bitcoin mining or hand-waved it away as being better done in a theoretical, future sidechain.

On the finance front, laws and jurisdictions were unclear or hostile to blockchain securities, which hasn't changed much since but at least we have ETFs today. The traditional finance world wasn't ready for DeFi.

But there was a lot of excitement around Bitcoin. It had recently gone parabolic in price and gotten a lot of attention. So, what happened is early adopters and degens were the ones who tinkered.

Rare JPEGs

Counterparty made experimenting with tokenomics accessible to non-cryptographers, who used it in unexpected ways, like to publish, distribute, and trade rare JPEGs instead of securities.

Not using enhanced asset information to add an icon to a ticker symbol that ultimately represented a real world asset, but to share JPEGs and simply declare, "This token and that JPEG are one and the same."

It was EARLY. NFT jargon had not yet been popularized, but Spells of Genesis had its grails like SATOSHICARD, and Rare Pepe was minting certified rares and trading PEPECASH, its memecoin, on the DEX.

And there were rallies in 2016 and 2017, tiny in comparison to what would come later, but enough to see the potential for this new way of making things by blending internet culture with blockchain tech.

Onchain Maxi

Over on Ethereum, now live, you had CryptoPunks, CryptoKitties, Dada. But for me, building on Bitcoin, onchain, was the thing. Even if it wasn't byte-efficient or in a future sidechain, at least it worked, today.

And I'll admit, I was skeptical at first. I paperhanded many airdropped grails. But the Rare AF event in 2018 that brought together pioneers from Ethereum and Counterparty really solidified it for me.

Soon after, I got into the mix with my own project called Bitcorn Crops which used Counterparty in novel ways to do gaming and yield farming. Just in time for a Bitcoin winter that wouldn't thaw for three more years.

I’ve been working to build and promote Counterparty (XCP) ever since, speaking at events in New York, Miami, Atlanta, and Mexico City to share my passion for permissionless innovation in art and technology.