Jack Butcher

Jack Butcher was born in 1988 in Swindon, England, studied graphic design at the University of Wales in Cardiff, moved to New York in 2010, and spent a decade as a creative director in Fortune 100 advertising, working on Amazon, Nike and Ferrari. He ran his own agency with his wife Celia, and concluded that the model was broken because every dollar demanded another hour of his time. In January 2019 he walked away and started Visualize Value as a daily practice: one black and white image a day distilling an idea about leverage, value or independent thinking, published on Instagram and X with no ad spend. He made roughly a thousand of those images. The practice turned into a product line, starting with the Daily Manifest planning sheet and then courses, and Visualize Value passed a million dollars in sales by the end of 2020. In 2021 he moved the practice onto Ethereum. In February 2023 he launched Checks VV Edition, an onchain composable artwork that has since done over 250 million dollars in secondary volume, and days later Opepen Edition, an open source art protocol of 16,000 tokens that reveal through community consensus. His work has been shown at Christie's during Frieze New York, at Paris Photo, and at Art Basel Miami Beach and Hong Kong. He now lives and works in Tennessee.

He is a conceptual artist who works in visual systems rather than pictures: black and white diagrams that explain an idea and critique it at the same time, then onchain artworks that put the same ideas about scarcity and consensus into a market and watch what people do. Checks is composable, so burning four checks makes one, and the supply reduces itself. Opepen is open source and its 16,000 tokens reveal into sets submitted by other artists and chosen by holders. He also makes physical work, including silver gelatin prints, a silver sculpture with Asprey and monoprints auctioned at Christie's.

• Visualize Value, the daily black and white visual practice started in 2019
• Checks VV Edition, the composable onchain artwork with over 250 million dollars in secondary volume
• Opepen Edition, the 16,000 token open source art protocol revealed by community consensus
• Self Checkout, shown at Art Basel Miami Beach 2025 and acquired by X Museum in Beijing
• The argument that a large collection is one artwork owned by a network
• The argument that surface area beats scarcity before you have a reputation

On the show