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"Opepen Edition: the NFT collection for May
Each month, The Big Whale will be analysing a collection of NFTs. For the first of these, NFT analyst Konohime* has chosen to take a look at Jack Butcher's Opepen Edition, known by the pseudonym 'Visualize Value'.
Jack Butcher is not yet the best-known NFTs artist, but the Englishman has made a name for himself in the ecosystem.
It all started in 2021 with the publication of his first works as "Characters" on the Foundation platform. These will sell very well and start to give visibility to the artist known as Visualize Value, who will launch a new project in January 2023 called "Checks".
This collection of NFTs is an explicit reference to the importance of being verified on social networks, at a time when Elon Musk has blurred the lines more than ever on Twitter. For the past few months, certification of accounts on the social network with the blue bird has been subject to a charge, with no apparent change in terms of profile quality.
Jack Butcher has put 16,031 identical NFTs up for sale, at a price of $8.
Each NFT represents a grid of 80 "verified" logos (checkmarks) with colours that are changed regularly by... the artist. As long as the creator of a smart contract does not give up the possibility of updating the metadata (images, description...), the content of the NFTs can change.
Two months ago, the craze took off when Jack decided to change the colours of the grid so that they featured Matt Fury's iconic frog, the famous 'pepe'.
This change showed that Jack Butcher owned the collection and could change it at any time. In the wake of this, the artist proposed a tool that lets you burn your "Checks Edition" for a "Check Original", which is, in turn, immutable.
The interest of this system is twofold: on the one hand, the metadata is frozen, and on the other, the NFT can be merged with others to obtain a new NFT with a smaller grid and repeat until the final objective is reached: a "unique" check.
👉 In the end, only three will exist!!
While collectors were swapping Checks, many unofficial derivatives of the Checks collection appeared. These derivatives were launched by artist-collector Vincent Van Dough.
The Opepen Edition collection
This is where the collection we want to tell you about this month comes in: "Opepen Edition" 👀.
This time, no more check logo but a clean design of a Pepe outline filled with varied colours. Again, the NFT colours are checked by Jack Butcher and have been changed several times since the collection was launched.
Until the end of April, there was little information about this new collection and the only information available came from the opepenai Twitter page.
The information available gives an idea of what's to come: there will be talk of using artificial intelligence to personalise the design of its Opepen. These designs can be proposed to the community of holders, who can vote to create "sets" of several different edition numbers (ranging from a single edition to 40 copies).
To view the designs from the various collectors, simply visit the Opepen website.
For the moment, there are no plans to burn the NFTs during these proposals but only to change their metadata so that the image updates.
Data analysis of the Checks and Opepen collections
Despite a collection that is only a few months old, analysis of the data available on Cryptoslam allows us to draw an initial conclusion: these projects have worked particularly well for their creator.
Starting with an extremely low price from the mint, the Checks are trading on average, four months later, at around 1,300 euros and the Opepen at around 770 euros on average. Each collection brought in around €86,000 at the mint and sales generated €74,620,153.
With 2.5% royalties and sales having been able to take place on marketplaces that waive royalty fees, secondary market sales were able to bring in a maximum of €1,865,503 for Jack Butcher.
February was the month that, for the time being, saw the most volume on these two collections. One reason for this is the large number of Pepe spin-off collections, which have made the original collection more "original" while also promoting it. Another reason concerns the 8233 Checks that were burnt this month, lowering the total number available and making the remainders rarer.
February was also marked by an abnormally high level of wash trading activity, an activity that involves artificially inflating prices. This involved around 40% of dollar volumes, according to The Block.
According to data from Nansen, from 20 to 24 February, more than 50% of the volume in the Opepen collection would have been subject to wash trading.
A collection that understands Web3 culture?
Jack Butcher has shown with these two collections that he has fully understood the mix that can exist between technology and art. On the one hand, the Checks have tokenomics designed for traders and, on the other, the Opepen allow a more personal interpretation of their NFT.
All those who attended the mint and sold their NFT in March were able to see their €7 investment grow to €700. That said, in March the number of wallets that interacted with the collections fell sharply. According to Cryptoslam, compared with February, the number of transactions was divided by 10 and the number of active wallets by 3 for Checks. What's more, the price in April for both collections has only gone down and to make matters worse, transaction fees have only gone up, making onchain interactions more difficult.
For Opepen, take-up has also dropped, but not all tools are publicly available. Fortunately, to change metadata a simple signature is all that's needed requiring no transaction fees.
Disclaimer: the author owns unofficial derivatives of the collection
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