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Links for the Top 25 drops are HERE.

Long-term memes for long-term people

Context 

Jack Butcher solidified his Main Character status in 2023 with his masterpiece in memetic logo design, Opepen, a fun crowdsourced art curation project with weekly drops.

Now he’s introducing Opepen v2, an upgrade to the original with two significant features: 

1. Opepen community sets can now be seamlessly submitted, browsed, and voted on. This means anyone has a chance of making art that joins the official Opepen canon.

There were ~200 sets on offer when v2 launched today, including work from popular artists like Amber Vittoria, Perkwerk and FVCKRENDER. 

2. Opepen Auctions is a new place where Jack will auction off 1/1s of his own art and people can bid on them using unrevealed Opepens. Winning bids will go into a treasury that will then be used to compensate artists from the Opepen community sets. 

This creates an innovative waterfall that looks something like this: 

Opepen is always a weird one to cover because it’s tough to categorize. 

Technically, these are new drops sold for imaginary currencies – so far so good, that’s our bread and butter. 

But in this case the currency is art (Opepens), which is unusual. 

You could say that these collections are priced at 0.27 ETH since this is the current Opepen floor. So maybe they’re just normal ETH drops, but with a second transaction in-between (buy the Opepen, then claim the drop). 

The Opepen sets are even weirder because they’re not new tokens. Holders are just transforming an empty canvas (unrevealed Opepens) into art (revealed Opepens). And funny enough, the revealed art often becomes less valuable than the empty canvas. 

Anyway, it just shows how blurry the lines are between Opepens, SOL, WETH or whatever chain we’re marching to this week. Ever-present exchanges and price quotes mean it’s all money in a sense. 

Our take 

Blessed are those who can think in timeframes longer than a few minutes. 

While many of us are off chasing the latest rotation meta, Jack continues to slow-cook long-term memes for long-term people. 

Here he’s building what looks like a meme protocol, perhaps the first of its kind. It’s a mini-city where art is made, voted on democratically and then paid for with other art. 

In a way, Jack is turning Opepen into what Nouns wanted to become, but potentially better, and with 0.1% of their original budget. 

Another W for genius-solo-founders vs DAOs perhaps. 

Bottom line

One of our favorite projects from 2023 is slowly becoming one of our favorite projects of 2024.

NOTE: These drops are lightly curated. Our only requirement is that they have recognizable founders. As usual, DYOR. To learn more go here.

gwanak-gu by earthsample

I’m not exactly a fan of collage art, but this Verse collection by pseudonymous artist earthsample is making me reconsider.

These animated pieces mix natural and urban imagery from the artist’s recent Korea trip to create ethereal compositions.

The colors and flashing lights remind me of nostalgic old-school anime, particularly the epileptic kind, an unsurprising influence given some of the artist’s earlier work.

I’m digging it.

✨ Added to Top 25 ✨

Space Nation: Ape Odyssey

Before its biggest market test yet with the Prime Navigator PFP, web3 MMORPG Space Nation is taking a quick $APE-fueled detour with Ape Odyssey.

Priced the same as Prime Navigator, Ape Odyssey grants holders a free PFP (with all of the benefits that entails), plus additional perks for future releases. But there’s a catch: the mint is exclusive to holders of ApeCoin and other Yuga Labs assets.

Even after reviewing all of Space Nation's previous drops, which all sold out, the gameplay and tokenomics still raise some questions for me.

However, there’s potential for a good game here, which is why Prime Navigator is in the Top 25. And this seems like an upgrade to that deal for anyone already holding these ape-related assets.

✨ Added to Top 25 ✨

Scrips

As time goes on, we’ll see fewer and fewer primary sales for early Ordinal inscriptions, which makes projects like Scrips a dying breed.

Described as “an emergent art project with no commitments, no roadmap, no drama”, Scrips is simple: 155 AI-generated close-ups of physical Bitcoin coins with inscriptions numbered between ~4,500 and ~13,000.

It’s made in part by Timshel, an artist with an ETH track record who experimented early in Ordinals with the February 2023 drop Chainspace.

I’m partial to sub 1k inscription numbers, but it’s clear that the market also values later ones, as shown by the current 0.07 BTC floor for anything sub 10k on Magic Eden.