When Jack Butcher created the Checks VV non-fungible token (NFT) collection earlier this month, his intention wasn’t to earn lots of money or spark movement in the NFT space reeling from the effects of a prolonged crypto winter. The former advertising professional, who recently founded a creative agency called Visualize Value, welcomed a new baby with his wife in the leadup to the launch of his 16,031-edition NFT project on Jan. 3.
The project, inspired by the ubiquitous blue checkmarks used on social media to denote a verified account, has since ballooned in popularity, doing 1,820 ETH (about $2.9 million) in secondary sales on OpenSea at the time of writing. It has even spawned a number of derivative projects made by the NFT community, propelling the project to meme status.
“It’s just been nuts,” Butcher told CoinDesk. “The timing of this is so crazy but you can’t control it.”
The Nashville-based artist began thinking about the project in 2021 at the height of NFT mania. “When we were in the crazy hype cycle of NFTs in 2021, I was so interested in the technology because I’d been making art on the internet for two or three years prior and NFTs created a market that pretty much didn’t exist.”
In March 2021, he released an artwork called “NFTs Explained,” which satirically depicts the difference between a JPEG and an NFT with a verified blue checkmark to denote authenticity. “I’ve been stewing on that for some time,” he said. That project sparked the idea for Checks VV, which Butcher says is an introspective on the evolution of authenticity on the internet.
‘This artwork may or may not be notable.’
The concept of blue checkmarks representing verification was first introduced on Twitter in 2009 as a way to prevent notable figures such as politicians, brands and celebrities from being falsely impersonated online. Since then, the marking has become something of a status symbol across other platforms like Instagram and TikTok, denoting accounts with heightened authority…
