Before Jack Butcher Became a Household Name in the NFT Ecosystem — Before Checks, Before Opepen

Before Jack Butcher became a household name in the NFT ecosystem — before Checks, before Opepen, before his landmark 74 ETH ($123500) sale in 2021 — he was just a designer chasing clarity.

Jack Butcher is one of the most well-known names in the NFT ecosystem. From his early days chasing clarity in commercial design to becoming a key figure in the new wave of internet creators, Butcher’s journey has been one of persistent vision.

Butcher’s story didn’t begin in the meme coin trenches. It started in the agencies of London and New York where he cut his teeth as a commercial designer.

“I bounced around the agency scene for about 10 years. I basically worked in every commercial application of design you can think of,” Butcher says.

His agency grind eventually led him to build his own business, Visualize Value, known for its minimalist brand turned art studio that would go on to reshape how the internet thinks about ideas. Many of his visuals were even included in the Almanack of Naval Ravikant book.

Butcher’s first interaction with crypto dates back to 2017 when he created blockchain explainer decks for clients at Visualize Value. But it wasn’t until March 2021 that he minted his first NFT on Foundation, a moment he still recalls vividly.

“I always refer to it as that 56k modem moment. Minting your first piece and seeing it arrive there underneath your name. It just felt like a moment in internet history.”

Six months prior to minting Chisel, the UK born Butcher recalls being somewhat dismissive at the NFT space. His perspective shifted when an NFT collector, already a fan of Visualize Value, reached out wanting to own a digital version of his work.

“I was sent a link to OpenSea six or so months before and was like, what is this? It did not capture my attention at all. There was nothing on there that was interesting to me. I just had no idea what I was looking at and clicked out of it quickly,” he says.

But the collector persisted. “He messaged me and said, ‘I would love to collect your work.’ I replied, ‘Sorry, man, I can’t print white ink on black paper. I’ve tried, it’s a nightmare.’”

Jack Butcher grapples with digital ownership

Butcher credits the team at Foundation for also assisting in helping him change his mind about selling digital art with its beautifully presented UX at the time.

His early works, particularly many of his 1-of-1 NFTs, showed him grappling with ideas around digital ownership.

“A lot of my early pieces are trying to describe the mechanics that make it possible for people to own and trade digital property. As an artist, being able to make the artwork the product, rather than a marketing system for some other product or service was a game changer,” Butcher says.

That change crystallized with NFTs, Explained, a 1-of-1 that sold for 74 ETH in March 2021. It encapsulated the design philosophy he’d been refining for years. “A lot of the genesis of the stuff I’m doing now is kind of in that piece,” Butcher says.

Jack Butcher and the Naval Effect

One of the most pivotal influences on Jack Butcher’s creative evolution wasn’t another designer, it was tech philosopher and investor Naval Ravikant. “That was a series of massive unlocks in my mind,” Butcher recalls of initially stumbling upon Naval’s now iconic tweet thread How to Get Rich (without getting lucky).

At the time, Butcher was running his own agency but feeling boxed in by the limitations of traditional client work. But Naval’s mental models had a profound effect. They offered a lens for seeing the internet as leverage, where code, content, and capital worked around the clock.

Inspired, Butcher began visualizing ideas from the thread in his signature minimalist style.

“That was a huge inflection point in my story when I was trying to build these independent agency businesses. I had no real exposure or experience to the world of software and media. Just straight up agency experience. Naval’s wisdom really helped with how I’d been thinking the world works versus how it actually works. I dove into that and visualized some of those ideas from the thread.”

Things came full circle when Butcher’s graphics were included in Eric Jorgenson’s The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, a curated collection of Naval’s wisdom that became a cult favorite in tech and crypto circles.

“It massively changed my life. I’m still grateful that I stumbled upon those ideas and credit those frameworks for a lot of the massive inflection points in my personal journey and how I thought about putting work out into the world.”

Jack Butcher’s onchain experiments Checks and Opepen

Butcher didn’t just create two of the most iconic NFT projects of the last few years, he used them as onchain experiments in internet culture.

Launched on January 3, 2023,