Jack Butcher is not yet the most famous NFTs artist, but the Englishman has made a place 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, while Elon Musk has been blurring the lines more than ever on Twitter. For the past few months, certification of accounts on the bluebird social network has been paid for without apparently changing anything in terms of profile quality.

Jack Butcher offered 16,031 identical NFTs for sale at a price of $8.

Each NFT represents a grid of 80 "checked" logos(checkmarks) with colors that are changed regularly by... the artist. As long as the creator of a smart contract does not give up the possibility to update the metadata (images, description...), the content of the NFT can change.

A couple of months ago, the craze started when Jack decided to change the colors of the grid to show Matt Fury's iconic frog, the famous "pepe".

This change showed that Jack Butcher owned the collection and could change it at any time. The artist has proposed a tool that allows you to burn your "Checks Edition" for a "Check Original", which is immutable.

The interest of this system is twofold: on the one hand the metadata are frozen, and on the other hand the NFT can be merged with others to obtain a new NFT with a smaller grid and start again until the final goal is reached: a "unique" check.

👉 In the end, there will only be three!

While collectors were exchanging Checks, many unofficial derivatives of the Checks collection appeared. These derivatives were started by artist-collector Vincent Van Dough.

The Opepen Edition collection

That's where the collection we want to tell you about this month comes in - "Opepen Edition" 👀.

This time, no more checking logo but a clean design of a Pepe outline filled with various colors. Again, the NFT colors 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 will happen next: it will be a question of using artificial intelligence to customize the design of its Opepen. These designs will be proposed to the community of holders who will be able to vote to create "sets" of several different numbers of edition (ranging from a single edition to 40 copies).

To view the designs from different collectors, just go to the Opepen website.

For the moment, there are no plans to burn the NFTs in these proposals but only to change their metadata so that the image updates.

‍Data analysis ofChecks and Opepen collections

Despite a collection that is only a few months old, the analysis of the data available on Cryptoslam allows us to draw a first conclusion: these projects have worked particularly well for their creator.

Starting with an extremely low price at the mint, the Checks trade on average four months later at around 1,300 euros and the Opepen at around 770 euros on average. Each collection brought in about 86,000 euros at the mint and sales generated 74,620,153 euros.

With 2.5% royalties and sales taking place on marketplaces that waive royalty fees, the secondary market sales were able to bring in a maximum of €1,865,503 for Jack Butcher.

February has been the month that has, for the moment, seen the most volume on these two collections. One of the reasons for this is the large number of Pepe spin-off collections that made the original collection more "original" while promoting it. Another reason is the 8233 Checks that were burned this month, lowering the total number available and making the remaining ones scarcer.

February was also marked by unusually high wash trading activity, an activity that involves artificially inflating prices. This involved about 40% of dollar volumes, according to The Block.

According to Nansen's data, from February 20 to 24, more than 50% of the volume of the Opepen collection was subject to wash trading.

A collection that includes Web3 culture?

Jack Butcher showed with these two collections that he understood the mix between technology and art. On the one hand, the Checks have a tokenomics designed for traders and on the other hand, the Opepen allow a more personal interpretation of their NFT.

Everyone who attended the mint and sold their NFT in March was able to see their €7 investment grow to €700. That said, in March the number of wallets that interacted with the collections dropped sharply. According to Cryptoslam, compared to February the number of transactions was divided by 10 and the number of active wallets by 3 for Checks. In addition, 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, the popularity has also dropped, but not all tools are publicly available. Fortunately, to change the metadata a simple signature is sufficient and does not require transaction fees.

Disclaimer: the author has unofficial derivatives of the collection