LianGuai Observation | Opepen’s Rekindling A Community’s Co-creation and Win-win

LianGuai Observation Opepen's Rekindling of Community Co-creation and Win-win

Author: LianGuai Journalist Jessy

A new cultural movement is taking place in the NFT community.

Opepen, a small frog composed of various block patterns, suddenly became the Twitter avatar for many people overnight, and they all used the same Opepen image.

Opepen is a work by renowned digital artist Jack Butcher, and the avatar that everyone changed to is an NFT created by a KOL named ThreadGuy who focuses on NFT content output. The base color of this mutant ape is green, with pink eyes and eye corners, and a small red devil with an angel halo on its head.

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Jack Butcher created Opepen based on ThreadGuy’s MAYC. Having an avatar created exclusively for oneself by an artist is really cool for users.

Something interesting happened. Many loyal fans of Jack Butcher started changing their Twitter avatars to this customized Opepen, because they believed ThreadGuy would not change his avatar. People on Twitter started a frenzy to “become ThreadGuy”.

When this frenzy reached its climax, Jack Butcher launched an open edition series called Opepen Threadition, which includes tokenized versions of the customized PFP made for ThreadGuy.

In the end, ThreadGuy eventually changed his avatar, and all the income from Opepen Threadition will belong to him.

How did this cultural movement happen?

It all started on July 11th, when the number one holder of Opepen NFT, Bored Elon, proposed a trade to ThreadGuy: his first-generation Opepen (from which countless other Openen NFTs have been derived) in exchange for ThreadGuy’s influential MAYC (which is ThreadGuy’s avatar).

On July 14th, the situation escalated. Web3.0 lottery company @trustwayllc stated, “We are willing to offer 42.69ETH for ThreadGuy’s MAYC.”

But ThreadGuy obviously wouldn’t sell his MAYC. On the same day ThreadGuy announced that he wouldn’t sell, he posted an unofficial Opepen derivative image on Twitter, which caught the attention of Opepen’s author, Jack Butcher. Jack Butcher posted his official version of Opepen for ThreadGuy in the comments section of ThreadGuy’s tweet.

This Opepen adopts Jack Butcher’s unique geometric style and color scheme inspired by ThreadGuy’s Mutant Ape, redesigned to fit the format of Opepen.

Although many netizens expressed their belief that ThreadGuy wouldn’t change his avatar, he eventually did and organized a Twitter Sliance with over 3600 participants to commemorate this moment. During that Twitter Sliance, all the users in the audience had Opepen avatars specially made by Jack Butcher for ThreadGuy. It was like a performance art.

Opensea has also joined the frenzy of the NFT world. Opensea has modified its official Twitter profile picture and name for a period of time. The previous blue background with a white boat image has been changed to a blue background with a white graphic resembling the pattern of “Opepen”, and the name has also been changed to Opepensea.

On July 16th, when the custom Opepen trend reached its climax, Jack Butcher launched an open edition series called Opepen Threadition, which included tokenized versions of custom PFPs that he made for ThreadGuy. Each Open Threadition was priced at 0.001 ETH. It is worth mentioning that Butcher generously donated all the proceeds to ThreadGuy.

This is a cultural movement within the NFT community initiated by users, and the official project also participated in it. Participants also received rewards. As of now, OpenThreadition has a casting volume of over 40,000.

How is viral transmission achieved?

This is a cultural carnival in the NFT community and also a win-win social experiment.

The atmosphere in the NFT community is actually different from the overall atmosphere in the cryptocurrency community. Take the recent official offline event organized by Azuki as an example. It includes renting the most famous nightclub in the central area of Las Vegas for the whole night and inviting Azuki holders from all over the world to party. In other industries, people gather for meetings, research technology, and ultimately aim to connect resources and discuss cooperation.

For users, NFTs have become more like a social business card. Users who own NFTs of the same series form a circle, and users who truly identify with NFT culture make friends through NFTs. This is far more satisfying than the profit brought by trading NFTs.

Behind excellent NFT projects, there is usually rich cultural connotation, and they themselves are a cultural phenomenon.

Jack Butcher’s work that triggered this trend has become a cultural phenomenon several times in the community. Jack Butcher is a well-known artist in the NFT community. He first entered the field of crypto art in 2021. His first project that caught the attention of the crypto world was created based on the blue verification tick on Twitter. Jack Butcher created a 1/1 NFT called NFTs, explained. By visually simplifying the complexity, he explained the difference between NFT and JPG (NFT = Verified JPG) using a white background image and a blue tick. It was sold on foundation for a high price of 74 ETH.

After that, he created VV Checks, which is an infinite expression canvas aimed at challenging the concepts of ownership and author identity in the internet era. This was created again using the “blue tick” after Musk acquired Twitter. This creation is more like a social experiment. The eighty different colored checkmarks actually represent the reflection on Musk’s blue tick verification charging incident. Just like the Twitter blue tick verification requiring $8, this NFT was priced at $8. The trading volume of this project exceeded $100 million.

And Opepen is essentially a sociological experiment conducted by Jack. If the aforementioned Checks is an experiment on “bottom-up digital verification,” then Opepen is an experiment on “building high-quality real estate in the digital age through PEPE memes + PFP, while also embodying the concept of using NFTs as artistic canvases.”

Because Jack Butcher’s early works were all created around “Twitter,” his works and himself have gained immense popularity in the crypto community on Twitter. Coupled with NFT Kol ThreadGuy being the center of attention on Twitter, it was expected that the project would explode in popularity on the platform.

Looking at Jack Butcher’s several breakout projects, we can observe a pattern of “going viral” – his projects always accurately capture the current user sentiment and achieve viral spread through social media. Of course, the projects themselves need to be innovative, interesting, and fun. A key aspect of this fun and innovation is the ability to engage users. Jack Butcher repeatedly emphasizes the idea of “exploring NFTs as artistic canvases, which can go further than a single image.” These theories are put into practice in Checks and Opepen. Taking Opepen as an example, the opt-in unboxing mechanism enhances interaction and unprecedented participation. With the setting of 200 sets of Opepen 16K NFTs, there are 200 unboxing opportunities, allowing users to constantly surpass themselves over a longer period of time.

In terms of promotion, Jack Butcher also understands the viral spread of “memes.” He personally participated in the promotion and made it accessible to the public. During the promotion of Opepen, he launched the website opepefy, allowing everyone to quickly generate their own Opepen. Twitter turned into a frenzy about Opepen, attracting the participation of numerous whales.

And amid the climax of this cultural movement, Opepen Threadition was timely launched, with extremely low participation costs and all income donated to ThreadGuy. This reward for co-creators has always been a core aspect of NFT projects. Creating together, playing together, profiting from it, making friends along the way, seems to be the reason why a good NFT project can stand the test of time.

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