Opepen’s Rekindling A Community of Co-creation and Win-win

Open Rekindles Co-creation and Win-win in the Community

Author: LianGuai reporter 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 of many people overnight, and they all used the same Opepen image.

Opepen is a work by well-known digital artist Jack Butcher, and the avatar that everyone changed to is the Twitter avatar of KOL ThreadGuy, who is dedicated to NFT content output-a NFT created by a MAYC mutant monkey. The base color of this mutant monkey is green, the eyes and corners of the eyes are pink, and there is a red devil with an angel halo on the top of the head.

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What Jack Butcher created is a customized opepen based on ThreadGuy’s MAYC. Having an avatar created exclusively by an artist is actually a very cool thing for users.

Interesting things happened as a result, and many loyal fans of Jack Butcher began to change their Twitter avatars to this customized Opepen, because they thought ThreadGuy would not change his own avatar. People have started a “become ThreadGuy” carnival on Twitter.

When this carnival reached its climax, Jack Butche launched an open edition series called Opepen Threadition, which includes a tokenized version of the customized PFP he made for ThreadGuy.

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

How does the cultural movement happen?

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

On July 14th, the situation escalated, and 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 would not 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 that he created for ThreadGuy in the comments section of ThreadGuy’s Twitter.

This Opepen adopts his unique geometric style, and the color scheme is based on ThreadGuy’s Mutant Ape, redesigned to fit the format of Opepen.

Although netizens expressed their belief that ThreadGuy would not change his avatar, in the end, ThreadGuy did change it and organized a Twitter celebration with more than 3,600 participants to commemorate this moment. Under that Twitter celebration, all the users in the audience were wearing the Opepen avatar specially made by Jack Butcher for ThreadGuy. This was very much like a performance art.

OpenSea also joined in the NFT community’s carnival. OpenSea modified its official Twitter avatar and name for a period of time for this event. The avatar changed from a blue background with a white ship image to a blue background with a white pattern similar to “Opepen”, and the name was changed to Opepensea.

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

This was a cultural movement initiated by users, in which the official project also participated in the NFT community. Participants also received rewards, and as of now, Open Threadition has a casting volume of over 40,000.

How is viral transmission achieved

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

The atmosphere in the NFT community is actually different from that in the entire crypto community. Take the recent official offline event organized by Azuki, for example, it involved renting out the most famous nightclub in the central area of Las Vegas for a whole night, inviting Azuki holders from all over the world to party. In other industries, people gather for meetings, research technology, and the ultimate goal is to connect resources and discuss cooperation.

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

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

The artwork by Jack Butcher that sparked this trend has become a cultural phenomenon in the community several times. Jack Butcher is a well-known artist in the NFT community, and he first entered the field of crypto art in 2021. The first project that caught the attention of the crypto world was created based on the verified blue checkmark on Twitter. Jack Butcher created a 1/1 NFT called NFTs, explained, which visually simplified the difference between NFT and JPG (NFT = Verified JPG) using a white background and a blue checkmark, and sold it for a high price of 74 ETH on Foundation.

After that, he created VV Checks, which is an infinite expressive canvas aimed at challenging the concepts of ownership and authorship in the internet age. This was his creation using the “blue checkmark” again after Musk acquired Twitter. This creation was more like a social experiment, with eighty different colored checkmarks representing his thoughts on Musk’s decision to charge for blue verification and the $8 fee for Twitter’s blue checkmark verification. This NFT was priced at $8. The trading volume of this project exceeded $100 million.

Opepen is essentially a sociological experiment conducted by Jack. If Checks mentioned above was an experiment in “bottom-up digital verification,” Opepen is an experiment in “building high-quality digital properties in the digital age through the PEPE meme + PFP,” while also embodying the concept of “exploring NFT as an artistic canvas” to the extreme.

Jack Butcher’s early works were all based on “Twitter”, and his works and himself have a high popularity in the encrypted circle on Twitter. In addition, NFT Kol ThreadGuy on Twitter is the center of this topic, so it is expected that it would cause explosive spread on Twitter.

Looking at Jack Butcher’s projects that have gained popularity, we can find some “hot” patterns. His projects always accurately capture the current user emotions and achieve viral spread through social media, of course, the project itself needs to be innovative, interesting, and fun. One important aspect of this fun and innovation is to involve users. Jack Butcher repeatedly mentioned “exploring NFT as an art canvas, which can go further than an image”, and these theories are practiced to the extreme in Checks and Opepen. For example, in the case of Opepen, the opt-in unboxing mechanism enhances interaction and unprecedented participation. The setting of 200 sets of 16K NFT in Opepen allows for 200 unboxing opportunities, which allows users to constantly surpass themselves over a longer time period.

In terms of promotion, Jack Butcher has also mastered the viral spread method of “memes”. He personally participated in the promotion and made it almost barrier-free for the public to join in. During the promotion phase of Opepen, he launched the website opepefy, allowing everyone to quickly generate their own Opepen. At that time, Twitter turned into a carnival about Opepen and attracted the participation of many whales.

Under the climax of this cultural movement, Opepen Threadition was timely launched, with extremely low participation costs and all income donated to ThreadGuy. This kind of reward for project co-creators has always been the spirit of NFT projects. Creating together, playing together, making profits in the process, making friends, seems to be the reason why a good NFT project can last.

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