When Elon Musk bought Twitter in October 2022, the internet collectively braced. The world’s richest human being’s new toy was now a social media platform with an active user base of 368 million accounts. what can go wrong? One of the billionaire’s first changes to Twitter was to change his system of “gentlemen and peasants” to decide who receives a blue check mark next to your name on the site. These checks, which users had to request, were a designation of the notoriety, activity and authenticity of the accounts. Instead of that top-down system, users can now simply purchase blue check mark notability for eight bucks a month.
To distinguish accounts that Twitter verified using its original system, a message appears when you click the blue check mark next to a user’s name: “This is a legacy verified account. It may or may not be noticeable.” That median statement might be the most accurate emblem of the Internet’s position, as it straddles the line between reliance on centralized authorities and building a more decentralized, empowering, and grassroots way of doing things over the internet. of the block chain. This idea did not go unnoticed by the artist, designer and blue Twitter subscriber. Butcher, which saw the Twitter verification debacle as the perfect cultural storm to explore through the release of Checks VV. A Edition open 24 hours The NFT artwork released on January 3, 2023, Checks has since become one of the most innovative NFT projects the space has seen, and it’s only just getting started.
What is Jack Butcher’s Checks VV?
With its conceptual roots in a March 2021 1 of 1 NFTs Called “NFT, Explained” by Butcher’s creative agency Visualize Value, Checks’ layout is visually as simple as it gets: 80 differently colored Twitter checkmarks arranged in a grid.
But what began as a unique social commentary artwork quickly became a thought-provoking exercise in social status and motivation in an online world. The open edition of Checks saw 16,031 mints of the artwork in total and barely reached 2,000 ETH in secondary sales on Open sea. Having been impressed by its success, Butcher decided to take the project further, pushing the boundaries of what NFTs can do and how people perceive their own nature.
“Exploring NFTs as a canvas for art can go far beyond just pointing to a picture.”
Butcher
“It’s a combination of the $8 to buy state and this idea that verification and awareness now is something that we have the infrastructure to allocate from the bottom up,” Butcher explained while speaking to nft now. “The open-edition reception created this incredible opportunity to flesh out the premise and continue to drive the question and play with the concept in a deeper and more interesting way.”
One of the ways Butcher is experimenting with this concept is by changing the metadata (appearance) of NFTs in the collection, encouraging people to think about what an NFT really is.
“What are you buying when you are buying an NFT?” Butcher posed for the Web3 community. “Are you buying an image? I’m not arguing that you’re not buying art. I am [challenging] if you are buying an image […]. They are digital collectibles, to a degree. But exploring NFTs as a canvas for art can go far beyond just pointing to a picture. And that’s where I get into the mechanics of the second phase of the experiment.”
The unique check burning mechanism
The second phase of checks involves a burning dynamic that creates unique (and sometimes conflicting) incentives for holders, causing them to stop and reflect on what they are doing with their NFT and why. Once Butcher implements the infrastructure, checkholders will be able to burn their NFT to turn it into a piece of on-chain art.
Multi-issue holders can then take Checks further: burning two 80-check pieces creates a 40-check work of art, burning two 40s creates a 20-check piece, and so on, reaching benchmarks of 10, five, four and ultimately resulting in a single color check mark artwork.
Only 250 of them could exist, given the number of headlines in the collection, but it doesn’t stop there. If a holder purchases and burns 64 pieces of single color checks, he can produce a single piece of black check art. Of those, only three may exist, the result of burning 4,096 editions of the 80-check artwork. However, this creates an interesting reverse dynamic for headlines. While individual tokens are rarer (and thus more valuable in the traditional NFT collecting sense), the more tokens burned to chase those tokens, the rarer 80 token tokens become.
“There are rumors of people interested in putting together DAOs to achieve this.”
Butcher
The further a collector progresses with the project, the more options they will have. To increase collector agency at every point in the collection’s creative journey, Butcher is allowing holders to play around with token identifications and even color schemes. When a collector burns two tokens to create a new NFT, for example, he must choose which token ID to keep, which Butcher hopes will reveal which numbers people find important.
As the color of the collection pieces is affected by the particular tiles that come together to be burned, Butcher also believes that holders could strategize their approach according to visual preference rather than rarity. He predicts that some may use specific color schemes to create unique pieces for themselves as collectors, almost like forging their own special PFP via the burnout mechanics involved.
“There have been people who have reached out to gain access to contracts to establish [bodies] gather resources to go after [the single black checks]”Butcher said of his predictions about how people will interact with the rarer pieces in the collection. “There are rumors of people interested in putting together DAOs to achieve this.”
The future of the VV Checks collection
Butcher is delighted to see several spin-off projects stemming from Checks. He says he’s happy to draw attention to artists and community members who are innovating with the artwork, but might not have the distribution potential that he does. Together with his technical team of Web3 builders jalil.eth Y trafficButcher devoted a page to the VV Checks official website to derivative projects.
At the time of writing, Butcher has not released the code for holders to start burning their digital tokens. When he does, the community he’s built around Checks will take the project on its own trajectory. Whether or not his predictions about the collection will come true remains to be seen. Still, Butcher has already done what few other projects in the space have considered accomplishing: use NFTs to reflect on the internet culture they grew out of, and let the community create their future.
“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 would want to play this game.”
He’s referring to checks here, but that statement could easily apply to the broader world of NFTs. Checks VV is a microcosm of that larger ecosystem, encouraging people to think about what they’re doing on every possible level while inviting them to take ownership of the thoughts and behaviors that get them there. “This work of art may or may not be remarkable,” butcher wrote when he released the open edition of the unique artwork that started it all. Satire aside, few would argue that Checks VV is the ultimate.
