How Jack Butcher’s checks are challenging the way people view NFTs

When Elon Musk bought Twitter in October 2022, the internet collectively warmed up. The World’s Richest Human is now a social media platform with an active user base of 368 million accounts – What could go wrong? One of the billionaire’s first changes to Twitter was to change the “lords and peasants” system for deciding who gets to blue check mark next to their name on the site. These checks, which users had to apply for, were a designation of the accounts’ notability, activity, and credibility. Instead of this top-down system, users can now simply purchase a blue checkmark for eight dollars a month.

To distinguish which accounts Twitter has verified using its original system, a message appears when you click the blue checkmark next to the username: “This is an old verified account. It may or may not be noticeable.” This mean statement could be the most accurate slogan for the Internet’s prestige because it straddles the line between reliance on centralized authorities and building a more decentralized, empowering, and terrestrial way of doing things online. blockchain. This idea was not lost on artist, designer, and Twitter Blue subscribers Jack Butcher, who saw the debacle of Twitter Checks as the perfect culture storm to explore with the release of Checks VV. a The version is open 24 hours a day The NFT artwork was released on January 3, 2023, and since then Checks has become one of the most innovative NFT projects in the space — and it’s just getting started.

What is Jack Butcher VV Checks?

With its conceptual roots in March 2021 1 of 1 NFT Called “NFTs, Illustrated” from Butcher creative agency Visualize Value, the check artwork is as visually simple as it gets: 80 Twitter checkmarks in different colors arranged in a grid.

But soon what started as a one-off work of social commentary artwork became a thought-provoking exercise about social status and motivation in the online world. The open issuance of checks saw 16,031 minutes of technical work in total, and saw nearly 2,000 ETH in secondary sales in open c. Stunned by its success, Butcher decided to take the project further, pushing the boundaries of what NFTs can do and how people perceive themselves.

“It’s a combination of eight dollars buying a state and the idea that validation and relevance is now something we have the infrastructure to map from the bottom up,” Butcher explained while speaking to Nft Now. “The reception to the open version created this wonderful opportunity to expand on the premise and continue to question and play with the concept in a deeper and more interesting way.”

One of the ways Butcher is testing this concept is by changing the metadata (the look) of the NFTs in the collection, and encouraging people to think about what an NFT really is.

“What do you buy when you buy an NFT?” Submit Butcher to the Web3 Community. “Would you buy a picture? I don’t argue that you don’t buy art. Me [challenging] Whether you buy a photo […]. They are somewhat digital collectibles. But exploring NFTs as a canvas can go much further than pointing to an image. Hence, I touch on the mechanisms of the second phase of the experiment.

Verifies the unique burning mechanism

The second stage of the check involves a burn dynamic that creates unique (and sometimes conflicting) incentives for holders, causing them to pause and think about what and why they are doing with their NFT. Once the Butcher infrastructure goes live, check holders will be able to burn the NFT to make it a piece of art on a chain.

Multiple edition owners can then make the checks further: burning two 80-check pieces creates artwork with 40 checks, burning two 40-check pieces creates a 20-check piece, and so on down the line, hitting 10 benchmarks, and 5, and 4, and eventually resulting in a single colored checkmark artwork.

There could only be 250 of those, given the number of group holders, but it doesn’t stop there. If a holder obtains and burns 64 colored squares, he can produce one black check artwork. Of these, only three could have ever existed, as a result of the 4,096 burning copies of the artwork made up of 80 checks. This creates an interesting reverse dynamic for holders, however. While individual check pieces are rare (and therefore, more valuable in the traditional sense of NFT aggregation), the more tokens burned to chase those pieces, the rarer the 80-check pieces will become.

“There is a hum of people interested in getting DAOs together to go after it.”

Jack Butcher

The more the collector advances with the project, the more options they have. To increase the collector’s agency at every stage of a collection’s creative journey, Butcher allows owners to play with code identifiers and even color schemes. When a collector burns two pieces to create a new NFT, for example, he must choose which token ID to keep, which Butcher hopes will reveal numbers that people find important.

Since the coloring of the pieces in a deck is affected by the tokens that are clustered together to be burned, Butcher also believes that holders may strategically approach according to visual preference rather than rarity. He speculates that some may use specific color schemes to create unique pieces for them as collectors, almost like forging their own PFP via the combustion mechanics involved.

“There were people reaching out to get access to contracts to create an unreliable company [bodies] to gather resources to go after them [the single black checks]“There’s a hum of people interested in getting DAOs together to go after them.”

The future of the collection of checks VV

Butcher is thrilled to see so many derivative projects springing up from the checks. He says he is happy to bring attention to artists and community members who create artwork but may not have the distribution capabilities that he does. Together with his technical team of Web3 builders jalil. eth And TrafficButcher devoted a page on Official website VV checks for derivative projects.

As of this writing, Butcher has not released the code for owners to begin duplicating their digital codes. When he does, the community he has built around checks will take the project on its own course. It is not yet clear whether his predictions about the group will come true or not. However, Butcher has already accomplished what few other projects in the space have set out to achieve: using NFTs to reflect on the internet culture that sprang from them while leaving it up to society to craft its own.

“We’re thinking about how we can develop this piece of art to really understand people’s intentions,” Butcher said of his motivations behind the project. “To reveal something about how people might want to play this game.”

He’s referring to checks here, but that statement could easily be applied to the broader NFT world. Checks VV is a microcosm of this larger ecosystem, encouraging people to think about what they are doing on every possible level while inviting them to own the thoughts and behaviors that lead them there. This artwork may or may not be noticeable. Butcher Books When he released the single artwork, the open release that started it all. Spelling aside, few would argue that Checks VV is the latter.