Inspired by

Jack Butcher

Jack quit a New York agency job in 2018, burned out on running a studio within months, and started posting simple drawings of ideas to find clients. The rules were tight from the start: black, white, a little gray, one typeface and plain shapes.

What gets me is how often Jack turns the act of paying into the work itself. When Twitter began selling the blue check for $8, the answer was Checks, a 24-hour edition at $8 where you burn and merge 80 checks down to 40, 20, 10, 5, 4 and 1, and the last step, the Black Check, takes 4,096 editions, so no more than three can ever exist.

Then, at Art Basel in 2025, Self Checkout printed a receipt that grew with every dollar people paid, and in September 2026 every eligible $8 payment through X Money became a Credit, its transaction hashed into four plates of cyan, magenta, yellow and black.

I keep seeing the same numbers come back: $8 for a Check and $8 for a Credit, 80 checks in an Original and 80 Credits burned for a Statement. And Jack's first account was called scale_trust, eight years before a contract that calls the work made from acts of trust.

Alpha Centauri Kid

Alpha Centauri Kid, ACK for short, painted in oils from middle school and spent fourteen years in a government job before finding NFTs in March 2021. Later that year the SuperRare genesis piece, ctrl + alt + generate, sold to 6529 for 165.29 ETH, and ACK left the job.

The Muse has run through the work since 2021, and in one interview ACK said there is no talking to the Muse, only obeying it. Argonauts takes that into Greek myth, with Jason's crew as nearly ten thousand skeletons serving the Muse, and ACK signed the contract with one line, “Sing to me, Muse,” an echo of the first line of the Odyssey.

What I love most is the color. I counted, and a typical Argonaut has around a hundred shades in about two hundred pixels, so every second pixel is a mix of its own, and #9862 has 105. Pixel characters usually get a handful of flat colors, while these look painted, and I think that's the oil painter still at work.

The two of them have met before, too: in 2024 ACK made set 030 for Jack's Opepen.

Credonauts

Credits are the paint and Argonauts are the canvas. A Credit prints with at most four inks, fourteen colors in all, while an Argonaut shades with around a hundred, so up close the two don't match at all. From a few steps back, though, every Credit reads as one shade, light or dark, and that is enough to rebuild the drawing.

So I sort the Credits into families from dark to light and let each Argonaut's own shading decide where every one of them goes. The paint stays exactly as Jack printed it, the drawing stays exactly as Alpha Centauri Kid made it, and all I add is the order.

The home page builds every Credonaut live from 110,390 whole Credits and all 9,977 Argonauts, so you can pick any pixel and see which Credit sits there.