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Gas Wars with @jackbutcher
Recorded: Sept. 17, 2025 Duration: 0:39:46Space Recording
Short Summary
In an engaging discussion, Jack Butcher shares insights into his upcoming Token Zero launch, the innovative minting process that ties token IDs to outcomes, and the broader implications of survivorship bias in the crypto space, highlighting trends and growth in network art.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. All righty. Hello, hello. My name is Adam and I am the community lead over here at OpenSea.
I'm always super grateful when our community, you guys, everyone here in the audience takes time out of their busy days to hop on spaces with us.
And I just feel really special because I get to interview these incredible artists and teams who are just making waves in the space and who
are really pushing us forward. I'm psyched to talk to Jack Butcher today. Like many of you,
I've been really impressed by a few things about Jack. He simplifies really complex topics into
extremely clear visuals, which for anyone who has ever been alive, you know that that's really, really hard to do,
to take something super complex, trim it down.
And he does that with what seems to be just effortless.
So that's incredible.
The way that he's championed and produced innovative network art
and the fact that he's here, you know,
hours before his drop, giving us his time.
So Jack, the auction for Token Zero is underway.
The larger drop is only a few hours away how are you feeling right now good thank you mate thank you for having me i appreciate
it thanks everybody for listening you've had an incredible run on spaces this week and so i just
wanted to give you personally my gratitude because you've been talking about your story you've been
talking about the story about this drop um i saw you were talking to Roger. You spoke with Artblocks. You
spoke with a couple other people. So seriously, thank you for being here. Yeah, thank you.
No problem. I think the thing that you've probably already said hundreds of times in your career,
but I think is important for setting the context, at least for this space,
is just if you can give us sort of a quick summary of your background and your history
that led you to what you're doing now. Yeah, so I studied graphic design
in the UK, graduated from that program, and then started working as an intern in London in
these small, uh, design studios and got this opportunity to go to New York with a couple
of friends of mine who were, um, able to get extremely steeply discounted airline tickets
at the time. And just before I departed for that, I was I went on Craigslist and looked for
design internships, just so I could meet up with people in
New York that were doing what I was doing in London. And that
led to me eventually getting a job in New York in this really
small design studio. And then bounced around the sort of
commercial design marketing world
for about eight or nine years doing all sorts of different things. So like branding,
advertising, shooting videos, building websites, making digital products.
And by about eight, nine years into that, I was like naive enough, I guess, to be like,
oh, I could do this by myself started an agency went through a bunch
of different iterations of what that was but landed in this spot which is now retroactively
labeled as visualized value which is uh basically the core idea there is what you were kindly
describing before is like take something complicated and distill it into its visual essence and i would do that as a
service as an agency business for a year or so where you know sit down with founders and and
people who had things that they had trouble explaining and produce these visual narratives
for them to go to market with or to train their staff with or any kind of application you can think of for simplifying a
story. And then just was posting these images on Instagram and Twitter at the time to get clients
for that business and eventually built this small community of people digitally in, I think it was
Slack group at the time. And somebody messaged me and said can I um
can I collect your work and I sort of threw me for a loop a little I was like well not really
it's just you know these are just things I'm making to try and grow my business and um
the that was when I sort of first got introduced to the uh Aetherian rabbit hole and ironically
they sent me a link to open
sea at the time this was in late 2020 and i remember going on i was like what am i looking
at here i've got no idea what this is and um sort of didn't understand the ecosystem in its entirety
so looking at something that at the time i think open sea was like purely secondary listings of
stuff so i had zero context of what any of this stuff was. It wasn't
until three, four months later, I got invited to Foundation, the one of one auction house platform
that it all kind of clicked in my head. And then I just started minting work one of ones back in
March 2021, I think was the first one. And then have slowly sort of iterated on that and playing more
in the like higher volume collection space for the last couple of years. That's such a cool story.
I think everyone has a really unique way that they found themselves in the realm of crypto and NFTs
and particularly Ethereum, where I think the majority of your work is based
and it's always i think interesting for listeners because all of us have a different story but
hearing someone else talk about how they came in and how someone like asked to collect your work
and you're like what does that even mean in this digital context like yeah just go right click save
the picture bro and then that sent you down this rabbit hole of the different marketplaces and the different ability to put work on chain.
I think that's so fascinating.
Before we get into Gas Wars, I had another question that I think will sort of help inform the conversation that we're about to have.
And your work is oftentimes labeled as like network art in addition to being this simplified version of complex topics.
I'm curious how that came about in your mind or how that evolution came about.
Because a lot of artists have seen your success and they've seen the way that you've been able to impact people beyond just
a small collector base. It's sort of like one person has an effect on the other, which then
has an effect on two people and then four people and then eight people. I'm curious, where did that
all come from? And was that intentional on your end? Or was that just something that evolved as
you continued to mature your practice? I think, you know, when it first occurred to me, or the idea of network
effects was actually, I think I was optimizing for that in building the first iteration of
visualized value itself, I pick this single constraint, publish these ideas consistently.
And that had this compounding effect of, you know,
building this network of people that were interested in those same ideas. And I built
some incredible friendships and relationships through just doing that consistently for a
couple of years before I even knew what Ethereum was or what an NFT was. And then actually in the
one of the first collectors of one of the vv one
of ones as there's a piece called nfts explained which is sort of the genesis goes all the way back
to the check mark as this symbol that represents like a social contract or authentication and him
and i had a conversation uh a couple weeks after he bought that piece. And he was like, you know what?
You know why I collected this?
Like, obviously there's something that resonates about how the idea is
communicated,
but you once shared this screen recording of your Instagram analytics.
And there's like a tab in Instagram where you can show like reposts of a
story.
It was like that instantly hit me as like these, these things are
like self propagating, they have this like velocity to them if they resonate, obviously.
And I think that that's like the foundational understanding of network effects. And then
what Ethereum does as a like, layer deeper than that, let's say is the ability to actually own those things as opposed
to just consume and share them creates all of these other extra layers of of possibility and
how you design things and the systems can be that much more sophisticated and interesting and people
obviously pay more attention to these things if they own components of the system.
And I think it was, you know, it was never a,
never sort of a label that was, I was in pursuit of necessarily.
It's just the thing that I think has been the common theme in,
in visualized value as a practice even before Ethereum.
That's really cool to hear
because I've heard Raoul Paul talk about Metcalfe's Law,
which essentially describes the value of the network
and how it's expressed through the number of users
who are connected to the network
or participate in the network.
And this concept sort of, you saw it sort of invisibly and you were like,
hey, I want to go do this rather than maybe knowing exactly what it was called or the theory
behind it. I think that's really fascinating that you were able to like cut through similar to how
you do with visualized value with your visual work. You were able to sort of cut through all
the noise and just get to the root of it, which was like, I need to grow this network of, or not even need, but I want to grow this network.
And you were able to see through it. That's really, really cool.
That kind of brings me now to the Abraham Wald story about survivorship bias. I'm curious,
is that a story that you came across? Is it a story that you sought out? Or is this another one of those things
that you just saw through the lens
of this very unique perspective that you have
and then arose in this project, Gas Wars?
So I think, I can't remember the exact instance
I first was confronted with it.
I think it might have even been like in response
to some of those like network building activities
prior to understanding this world at all,
which is, you know, if you're trying to grow
any kind of body of work on the internet,
there are these power
laws at play where the examples that you're trying to copy or reverse engineer have tapped
into something that is, maybe doesn't make it as obvious as to how many thousands or
millions of attempts there have been by other people to do the exact
same thing. And I always remember it being used as like a meme in response to people like tweeting
out like, hey, I figured this out. And it's as easy as this, just do x, y, and z in this order.
And then that plane that the Wikipedia version of the survivorship bias was sometimes included
as responses to that so it's like uh
it it sort of intertwines with the visualized value story way back and um and and the process
of just consuming ideas that have these wide applications was just a big part of still is a
part of visualized value but the beginning beginning was like, I was just like my
head in these books, trying to find these ideas that sort of map out reality in interesting ways.
And this is definitely one of those. Yeah, I think for everyone in the audience,
who may have heard Jack speak earlier in the week, he talked a lot about
this Abraham Wald story and what survivorship bias is. But Jack, for the people who are here,
maybe hearing you for the first time this week, can you sort of explain what this concept is that
we're talking right now? And then we'll talk about how it sort of informs gas wars.
Sure. So the visual analogy for this concept of survivorship bias is this World War II plane that is littered with these red dots, bullet marks.
And the story it's in reference to is these planes would make it back from fighting in World War II
and the engineers and the people working to improve them for their next run were like,
we need to patch it up in all the areas that it got shot. And the story that they're missing in doing that is that the real lessons were contained in the planes that never made it home.
So the ones that got shot in areas that ultimately destroyed them and made it impossible for them to return, that's where the richest information is.
But we as human beings have this like short, like program short sightedness when it comes to that, where you, the thing in front of you vastly distorts your perspective on, you know, the, the entirety of information or the, the, the breadth of the truth.
So it's almost like, let me just make sure I'm summarizing this correctly. The planes that made it back from these battles overseas, those potentially had some information that would be useful because you could reinforce certain areas of the plane, you could change the design based on where they were shot so that maybe they were slimmer or maybe they were, I don't know, you could make changes. But the what would have given you the most information would have been the planes that actually got shot down overseas, because those planes were
maybe the weakest, or those planes were maybe the worst designed. And so had we had access to those
planes, we actually could have made incrementally better adjustments for that very need, which was
those air fights overseas. But because we never got them back, the only data
we really had access to were the planes that did make it back. And so we made maybe small
improvements or maybe adjustments that weren't even really improvements because the data set
was missing. Is that kind of? Correct. Cool. And so for the visual way in which you approach this,
I pinned a tweet at the top, which Twitter is, I don't know, just the way that it pinned it is not great.
But if people click into that tweet that I've heard people on Spaces call the Jumbotron up at the top, you'll see that these are visually displayed as wireframes.
And I'm curious, you know, of all of the different ways in which you could visually describe this concept what drew you to this wireframe concept
i think the main justification is this like vv dna you know the line width of all the vv pieces
and it being a signature a visual signature and an extension of all the work in in that practice
but it's also like this uh attempt to strip away all the superfluous so
it gives it volume and um there is the way in which the shots are fired does take into account
the depth of the plane itself so i think there's um there's like a stylistic justification but
also a couple technical justifications and then the way the marks
are applied is meant to mimic these hand-drawn completely unique marks in each case this isn't
you know the same symbol being applied 500 times it's each mark is generated uniquely on each on
each shot and so for people who maybe this is the first time they're hearing about it, or maybe they they tuned in today because they wanted to get a little bit more information so they could potentially participate later today when this goes live.
Can you kind of explain how you've structured the mint because you've been very upfront, even I think with the name of the collection for how this is going to go.
But can you kind of
explain the dynamics at play that participants will face when they go to mint this project
yeah I give a tiny bit of background before I do too it's like the idea of generative art or the
the common perception of generative art is let's design something that produces these beautiful outputs
and then put an artificial or an arbitrary cap on how many it can produce and then let's hope we
get that artificial cap right and it and it distributes rarity in a way that's interesting
for people to collect it what we try to do with this is have a very direct relationship between the token you choose to mint and the output.
So there's 500 possible outputs in this 500 second window.
And the token you choose, the number of the token you choose, is how many shots will be fired at that aircraft so if you choose token 10 it's a 10 token there's 10 bullets
randomly fired at that aircraft and then the plane either survives or it doesn't based on
where those shots land and how intense they are and what that does is it also creates this like
meta um competition where people are figuring out where in the grid to go.
So essentially, if I could superimpose my own thinking here,
people will...
I think this sort of scenario creates a demand
for the tokens with lower IDs
because those planes could be viewed as safer.
For example, token one,
like if there's only one shot fired at the plane, it can probably survive versus as you go up that
scale two, three, four, five, all the way up to 500. You might presume that the demand will go
down, given that more shots will be fired at that plane and the likelihood that the plane will survive will be lower.
So those are probably, I don't want to say less valuable, but there's also going to be, I think, less demand for them.
So the gas wars, I think, at least in the way that I understand the project, the gas wars will come from these lower tokens
where people will really fight to get the lowest token ID possible
so that their plane will survive.
Is that kind of how you see the dynamic playing out here?
Yeah, that would be my assumption.
There's also an economic incentive to go for the cheapest ones too.
And there's this interesting paradox in that the story itself
is the planes with the most shots fired, most shots fired at them, sorry, contain the
most information. And there's a there's a lens on that where you could like frame them as the most
valuable pieces. And that's why the price ladders in that way too. Because if firing one shot
doesn't really give you any doesn't really teach you anything.
It's fascinating. Don't you see a double paradox here though?
I don't even know if that's a term here, which is that, you know, for token ID number one,
let's say that costs one, is it $1?
Does it go up incrementally by like $1?
Yes. Okay.
So you might pay, you might want it for $1 because the likelihood that it will survive
is the greatest.
However, given the name of the project
and the demand for that token ID one, you might pay, you might end up paying more for that than
you would for token ID 500 in gas, depending on the demand and how much people are willing to bid.
So you may end up paying a significant amount for token one, even though it's only priced at $1,
because you have to bid on
gas and you have to try to get your transaction through.
Very possible, yeah.
So you have these kind of really interesting dynamics, all of which come to play sort of in
this very limited window, which I think is another interesting thing that you've done here is you've
added multiple constraints to sort of the logic and the approach, and now it's up to the market to see what will actually happen.
I'm curious, do you have any predictions for how you see this playing out?
Beyond the sort of behavior that will indicate that people are trying to secure a piece
at the lowest end of the range.
Not really, no.
I don't know beyond that.
Yeah, we're going to...
Maybe some competition for some meme numbers maybe too.
Yeah, we'll have to see.
Well, this project is, I believe,
the second to last ArtBlock's curated release.
You know, the AB500 is something that we over at OpenSea
are super excited about and
celebrating what does it mean to you to be included in this sort of like last push before there's that
final sort of cut off huge honor but not something i ever thought would would happen and um there's
another maybe this is a post-rationalization from me too but so much of the early art blocks
contribution to this space is obviously these massively iconic collections but there was this
phenomena of incredible demand you know 2021 where hopefully this as a contribution kind of
2021, where hopefully this as a contribution kind of refers to those early stages of art
blocks in itself too. It's like a note in the time capsule is the intent as well. So
my thinking there is even the term gas wars over time, you know, may fade from the
you know, may fade from the vernacular, let's say, may not be referred to as frequently as it was in
2021. But to me, it's kind of one of the most visceral experiences of this, of like the formation
of this little world and trying to create something that captures that and preserves preserves that and you could sort of use that as a
tool to tell that story is is interesting to me and where do you think this project sits on sort
of your career as uh not only someone who's visualizing these extreme concepts uh but also
sort of as an artist because a lot of your art, we talked
about this a little bit earlier, which we might call it like network art, network effects,
something like that. There is a very special relationship between the art that you make
and you and sort of the people who do things with it. There's actions here. You can combine things.
You can collect multiple things.
With this one, at least, there's a really special sort of relationship between how people are
engaging with the art and the actions that they take actually having an effect on the piece as a
whole, which you could almost say is somewhat of a performance piece. How would you describe where
this sort of career moment has taken you? I think, I mean, the answer is almost
contained in the question you asked is very eloquent, which is like the medium or the
container for it and art blocks as a partner kind of forced a lot of the thinking around this idea
to come together from a visual that was,
I was experimenting with around six months ago. And the, um, I think you could almost
view this as well as a, like a single image being unpacked or a single concept being told across
a collection of 500 images. I think some of the other bigger visualized value collections
they they do that but the ideas are kind of um
there maybe isn't a single idea that's being unpacked there right it's like a lot of niche references to crypto art culture and this to me feels like
anecdotally people I've shown this to uh in person are like way more intrigued than they would be
about some of the like hyper down the rabbit hole uh crypto art references that anybody on this space probably immediately gets.
And I feel like that is an evolution in a lot of senses where I have
the departure from the sort of social network native visualized value practice in all of the
crypto art stuff in the last two or three
years has been so extreme that it's very hard to even bridge the gap to say like how do you explain
checks to somebody that's been following visualized value and has never encountered
ethereum or any of the like complementary technologies or networks around it versus this
is like uh you know almost a layer deeper than deeper than a quote-unquote traditional visualized value image
where you can look at one piece and use it as this, like, icebreaker to tell that story and explain that concept
versus some of the other work is, like, behind these layers of nuance that require so much more
time and energy to get your head around and to be involved in even versus something like this,
I think, has a simpler interface for people to interact with it.
That makes a lot of sense. I'm now thinking about the body of work that you have brought to us, the crypto-native community. It started out with a lot of the hand drawings, the pieces that you're in a chapter where now you're experimenting within generative art.
Have any of the other collections that you've done been generative in this sense?
I'm trying to think.
I'm not a smart contract like dev.
So if they are, I see Jaleel in the audience.
He's probably like banging his head against the table.
Yeah, I mean, checks for sure.
Checks for sure. Checks for sure. Like everybody that was following the development of that project
and Jalil's work on those contracts,
I don't know if it's still pinned on his profile,
but the idea that that was a generative mechanism
mechanism that was deployed in post to this open edition is, in my mind, you know,
that was deployed in post to this open edition is,
I'm kind of fascinated by the, you know, people's desire to, like, get the label and wrap it around
the thing. I think, like, there are components of, I mean, you could even start to think about Opepon as a generative art project,
but the method for generation is far more organic than a hundred lines of code, right? It's like
this symbolic, there's like a symbol or a meme that becomes this like genesis or catalyst for
all those generative outputs by people and machines and anybody that
wants to contribute and i think generative art and ethereum and like the the ability to own these
things and interact with people who own them is like a generative layer in itself so it feels like
the label just being in reference to like
i don't know what these outputs are going to be is uh maybe like reductive so i do think
anything that requires participation from other people in order for it to take its final form
like even an open edition where the market
sets the size of that collection has this like you could make the argument there's a generative
component to that depending on what you do with it after but it's also like it's not you
controlling all the variables and uh not allowing for any input beyond that so i think it's uh
you know,
you could debate it in all sorts of different ways,
but there's, I would hope that people think of
the body of work that's come out of visualized value.
There are many forms of generative inputs
and outputs in that body of work.
That makes a ton of sense.
We've talked a little bit about constraints and the way that
you operate within certain constraints, whether that's, you know, posting every day or every other
day for visualized value, you know, whatever the cadence was, whether it's this project.
I'm curious, when you're thinking about the medium of art, do you start with the concept first
and then the medium becomes a constraint? Or do you start with the concept first and then the medium becomes a constraint or do you
start with the medium as a constraint and then build a concept out of the back of it how do you
approach it when you are thinking about creating a new body of work
yeah i think it's very chicken and egg after you've sort of been indoctrinated or after the like
models of the medium are running in your subconscious that influences
all the ideas you have in in post or at least it does for me where you're kind of
dueling or like uh what's the what's the word in tennis it's like the rally you have with the idea
where like what you discover to be possible along the way is informing like conceptually how
how uh sophisticated the the next idea can be but there's also like these these inputs in the case
of this like the invitation to participate in artbox 500 is actually what gave this a container
to become what it is now i don't think outside of that container, this would have
existed even. It would have sort of been those couple of sketches that were posted and sort of
set in the back of your mind until the final piece of the puzzle arrives. And I think that's
a lot of the part of the process is like sort of trust your instinct to produce this stuff.
And then like believe that the,
that the inputs that you receive in the future will help you refine it.
And I think that's another way to refer to this idea of network art,
right?
It's like the,
the way Chex came together,
the way Opepun came together, was really this public and transparent process
where you're iterating based on the reception to this thing.
And that's also sort of a core component of the internet itself
and the idea that you build a practice on the internet
that is, by definition, this two-way medium.
So I've never been able to answer the question directly by definition, this two-way medium.
So I've never been able to answer the question directly of how ideas come and form and how to think about it.
I think originally with visualized value, you have a good enough constraint
to produce those images over and over.
And then it's like the exercise becomes how good of an idea can you write or source or think about
and then put it through that single image output.
That's a very linear and easy to describe process.
But when you're talking about this like alien material of Ethereum,
it's like the things that you know about it or the things that you get exposed to
even by other people's experiments are informing you and and sort of influencing you in ways that can't really i
don't think be captured until you sort of retroactively look at what came out of all
those inputs and then you can sort of tell the story in hindsight and that's been that's definitely been true for me is like you can easily see where
the threads and the themes connect but in the in the moment just like oh this feels interesting or
good i'm going to share this and then based on the feedback to that that kind of gives you this
uh very subtle signal of whether or not that's worth keeping in the back of your mind or not
it's a fascinating process and it is really cool to hear because i get to talk to a lot of different
artists doing these spaces and everyone has their own practice either because they have found
success which is maybe a survivorship bias filter in and of itself,
or maybe it's because it feels good, or maybe because they have certain limitations that they've
committed to that they're producing a body of work in that specific time in their life,
and that is what they're committed to. So it's really sort of fascinating to hear you talk about
your approach. I want to make sure that you have enough time, Jack, to be able to sit and relax before the drop happens later today. So I have one final question for you before we
hop off. I'm curious, ultimately, what do you hope people feel and experience when they choose a
token during this mint? Now, of course, that doesn't guarantee that they're going to get that token
or it doesn't guarantee that their token
is going to quote unquote survive all the bullets.
But what do you want people to sort of feel
and experience when participating in this mint?
I think hopefully some communication of the idea itself
is implied in the interaction
and the way it's been designed like that
that experience is survivorship bias as much as the um as much as the artwork itself is
visually trying to imply too it's like um there's this
like these these the constraints that are wrapped around it are meant to sort of tell you something
about yourself like what choice do you make in that moment or if you choose not to participate
at all there's a there is a um a way to think about that in the context of like why you would
or wouldn't do something and uh like any i think final
artwork or body of work like what part of it resonates most with you i know the outputs that
i'm most fond of um i'm very just curious to see how that shakes out in the uh in the collecting
process and then after the fact when the dustles, what are the stories that exist within those outputs?
Cause there'll be these extremes at either end.
And that's been like one of the most interesting and enjoyable things about,
doing this stuff on the internet specifically is there's nuance and,
and like interpretation of this stuff that goes way beyond
your intent. And just people will interpret it as they interpret it, regardless of what you
intended it to be. So that's, uh, that's in, in many ways, my entire answer is void. It's like,
whatever you think it is, that's what it is. Well, I'm excited to see the timeline today.
I'm excited to see the Mint happen.
I actually just realized that I was not truthful.
I do have one more question for you,
which is how and where and when can people participate in this Mint?
And then we'll wrap it up.
So the details are on, I think, Artblocks,
the Artblocks account, which is up at the top here as well.
Go there.
And they've written a couple of great threads on all of the specific details.
But it's on artblocks.io today at 12 Eastern.
So an hour and 20 minutes from now.
All right.
Well, thank you, Jack, for hopping on with us.
I know that you've
been doing tons of spaces. A lot of people want your time. And so I feel really privileged that
we were able to hear from you today. And I hope that you get to sit by yourself for a little while,
kind of calm down and then get excited for this drop because it's really, really cool work with
a lot of concepts tied together in a way that totally
makes sense, but I think is having that effect of causing people to think a little bit more deeply
about what they're doing, why they're doing it, where they're doing it, how they're doing it,
and the ability for art to impact people and then their real-life choices is, I think, just a really
cool thing that you've been able to do.
So thank you.
Really appreciate it.
And of course, good luck on the Mint.
Thank you very much, mate.
Great host.
I appreciate it.
Of course.
Of course.
Thank you so much.
And we appreciate everybody in the audience.
And check out this Mint at noon Eastern on Artblocks.io.
And with that, thank you, everybody.
We will see you next week on Spaces.
