Color is the weakest rarity signal in a Credit. Jack Butcher’s new collection spreads its 122,154 pieces almost evenly across 15 ink combinations, each held by between 6.5% and 6.8% of the edition, according to population data published on Butcher’s official rating page. The real scarcity sits in a detail most viewers would miss: how many times the digit 8 appears in the buyer’s X Money transaction ID. Nearly three in four Credits have none. Only 425 have three or more.

Credits is the open edition Butcher sold through X Money on Sept. 20 and 21, 2026, at $8 per piece. It produced 122,154 Ethereum NFTs and roughly $977,000 in gross payments, about 7.6 times the 16,031 editions of Checks, the $8 open edition that made Butcher one of the best-known names in crypto art in January 2023. This guide covers how the mint worked, how each Credit is generated, where the rarity sits, what the market is paying and how the 80-Credit Statement burn changes the supply math.

What Is Credits?

Credits is a generative artwork by Jack Butcher, the British artist and founder of Visualize Value, in which every piece is seeded by a real payment. The title comes from the Latin credere, “to believe, to trust,” and the project site calls it “an artwork made from acts of trust.” Butcher announced the drop on X at 6:12 p.m. ET on Sunday, Sept. 20, under the working title “8.” Buyers sent $8 to @jackbutcher through X Money, typed an Ethereum address into the memo field and waited for delivery. The window closed at 8 p.m. ET on Monday, Sept. 21.

8

an open edition on x money

send $8 to @jackbutcher

enter your eth address in the memo

your transaction id is the seed for your artwork

closes 8pm est tomorrow
— @jackbutcher (@jackbutcher) September 20, 2026

The format stripped out almost every step a typical NFT mint requires. Buyers needed no mint page, no wallet connection and no ether for gas. Butcher matched payments to addresses and delivered the tokens himself, so the whole fulfillment process rested on trust in the artist, which is the dependency the title names. The tokens now live in an ERC-721 contract on Ethereum mainnet at 0x9763…3043.

The payment rail shaped who could take part. X Money, the peer-to-peer payments product inside X, began rolling out to U.S. Premium subscribers in late July, according to TechCrunch, and account setup requires identity checks tied to a U.S. bank account. That raised the cost of creating duplicate buyers and still left room for heavy repeat buying. AirdropAlert counted roughly 7,162 participating X accounts sending to 25,225 wallets. Divided into the final supply, that works out to about 17 Credits per participating account, a figure that points to a concentrated buyer base behind the headline edition size.

calling jack butcher’s new mint ‘extractive’ fundamentally misses what makes NFTs interesting.

5k+ x accounts and 25k+ unique wallets participating in a new mint is remarkable distribution for an art experiment.

it may also be the biggest X Money use case to date and that…
— Seven (@7316) September 22, 2026

How a Credit Is Made

Each Credit is drawn from its X Money transaction ID, a 21-character string of letters and numbers stored on-chain as the token’s seed. That makes the purchase itself the creative input. Butcher’s site lays out the process in four steps:

The transaction ID is hashed with SHA-256, producing 256 bits.
Those bits fill four 8-by-8 grids, one for each printing ink: cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK).
The payment timestamp selects which plates print, out of 15 possible combinations of the four inks.
Every 8 in the transaction ID registers visually on the work, and independent renderers display each one as a proof mark.

A fifth variable borrows from the printing press. Most Credits print with their plates aligned, while a minority come out misregistered, with plates slipping by up to two pixels, according to an independent open-source renderer built from the on-chain seeds. Butcher’s rating page sorts these into six print states: Registered, Slip, Nudge, Skew, Drift and Loose.

Where the Rarity Sits in Credits

Butcher’s official rating page publishes population counts for every trait, and three of them explain most of the collection’s structure. All figures below cover the full 122,154-piece edition as of Sept. 26.

Palette is close to uniform. The 15 ink combinations range from 7,962 Credits (black only) to 8,313 (magenta, yellow and black), a spread of 351 pieces across the entire edition. That is the distribution a random draw from a timestamp should produce. In practical terms, a single-ink Credit is about as common as a full four-color one.

Eights are the steep curve. Each additional 8 in the transaction ID shrinks the population by a widening factor: about 3 times from zero to one, 7 times from one to two, 11 times from two to three and 15 times from three to four.

Eights	Credits	Share of edition	Lowest ask (ETH)
0	89,494	73.3%	0.0265
1	27,997	22.9%	0.0265
2	4,238	3.5%	0.0328
3	398	0.33%	0.188
4	26	0.02%	1.83
5	1	<0.01%	Unlisted

Population counts from jack.art/credits/rating. Lowest asks from the rating page’s OpenSea listing snapshot of 9,103 listed Credits, taken the evening of Sept. 26.

Registration is the second scarcity axis. Some 106,676 Credits (87.3%) print Registered. The misprints split into Slip (4,898, or 4.0%), Nudge (4,826, or 4.0%), Skew (2,961, or 2.4%), Drift (1,815, or 1.5%) and Loose (978, or 0.8%). Misprints are heavily represented at the top of the rankings: six of the 10 highest-rated Credits carry one.

HOW TO GRADE JACK BUTCHER’S CREDITS

What ~13K sales tell us + some admittedly dubious price guesses

If you’re just tuning in…

Jack launched an open edition through X Money

You sent $8, include an ETH address & the transaction ID became the seed for one Credit

The ID… pic.twitter.com/EnWfgSkoPn
— Ktrap (@ktrap) September 23, 2026

The single rarest piece is Credit #11469, the only one in the edition with five 8s. Its seed, CfGBBD9888ceFdGsKW88H, came from a payment at 3:17 a.m. ET on Sept. 21 and holds a run of three 8s and a pair. It prints in cyan, magenta and yellow with its plates in register, holds the top score of 800 and was unlisted on OpenSea as of Saturday evening.

How the Credits Rating Works

Butcher’s rating assigns every Credit a score from 80 to 800, a scale built on the same digit as the price. It weighs five traits: palette, active bits (how many of the 256 bits are switched on), occupied cells, eights and registration. For each trait, the formula measures what share of the edition holds a value as rare or rarer, takes the negative natural log of that share and averages the results, with eights counted twice. Every Credit is then ranked against the full edition and mapped onto the 80-to-800 scale.

The methodology page describes the double weight on eights as an editorial choice and labels the output a descriptive index. It also warns that traits can be correlated, which means the score measures how unusual a Credit is and leaves pricing to the market. Third-party tools such as Credits Ratings pull from Butcher’s endpoint and note that their data can be cached for up to 24 hours.

What the Market Is Paying for Credits

Secondary trading has already moved about five times the primary sale. OpenSea showed $4.8 million in total volume and 15,660 unique owners on Sept. 26, with 7.6% of the supply listed. The collection floor sat near 0.0265 ETH, roughly $70 at an ether price near $2,690, or close to nine times the $8 mint price.

The asking prices by eight count show where buyers assign value. A Credit with one 8 is about 3.2 times scarcer than a Credit with none, yet the cheapest of each lists at the identical price. The premium starts at three 8s, where the lowest ask of 0.188 ETH is about seven times the floor. It jumps at four, where the cheapest of 10 listings asks 1.83 ETH, roughly 69 times the floor and about $4,900.

These are asks, and asks overstate what buyers will pay, especially in thin tiers. The four-8 figures rest on 10 listings out of 26 pieces in existence. Collectors reading these numbers should treat the three- and four-8 tiers as price discovery in progress.

Statements: The 80-Credit Burn

Holders can burn 80 Credits to assemble one Statement. The cap is 1,526 Statements, the number of complete 80-Credit sets the 122,154-piece edition allows. If every possible Statement were made, 122,080 Credits would be destroyed and 74 would remain.

lets talk about jack butcher’s mint because the supply math on this is fucking crazy

this was the first real x money mint mechanic i’ve seen done at this scale. so basically you send $8 to @jackbutcher through x money, put your eth address in the memo, and the transaction id… https://t.co/XGwqbZrYN2 pic.twitter.com/lXyehIwFCV
— jun.rise (@lsdjun) September 23, 2026

The cost of a Statement has already moved a long way from the mint. At the current floor, 80 Credits cost about 2.1 ETH, or roughly $5,700. At mint, the same 80 cost $640. The Statement artwork itself remains unpublished, and the project site says assembly “opens in 8 days” without naming a calendar date.

The average wallet holds about 7.8 Credits, far short of a full set, and independent developers have already posted open-source tools for pooling. The credit-pool contract collects Credits into 80-slot batches, burns full batches into Statements and sells each result through an on-chain auction; its repository lists the code as in audit prep. A second project, statement-maker, issues each depositor a receipt NFT carrying a vote on the Statement’s arrangement and 1/80 of the sale proceeds. Both are unaffiliated with Butcher, and neither has published a completed audit.

The Checks Benchmark

Credits reruns the Checks formula on a new payment rail. Checks launched on Jan. 3, 2023, as a 24-hour, $8 open edition that riffed on the price of Twitter Blue verification, and it produced 16,031 editions, per Butcher’s archive. Checks Editions could later be burned to mint Checks Originals, which begin as a grid of 80 checks and can be composited down by combining tokens. Cumulative secondary volume across Checks Editions and Originals has exceeded $250 million, according to TechFlow.

The two projects share a price, a burn-to-assemble structure and the number 80. They differ in scale. Credits has 7.6 times the supply of Checks and a much steeper burn ratio, since one Statement consumes 80 tokens. For readers following how artist-led drops have evolved since the marketplace shakeout, our coverage of the unwinding of the NFT marketplace era and our guides to a.c.k.’s Argonauts and zkSNARKs offer useful comparisons on supply design and claim mechanics.

Limits of the Data

Four caveats apply to everything above. First, the trait counts and rankings come from Butcher’s own rating endpoint, the only complete public source for the edition’s traits. Second, participant counts such as the 7,162 X accounts are third-party estimates, and Butcher has published no official buyer total. Third, the price data reflects listings on a single evening, and asks in the rare tiers rest on small samples. Fourth, the Statement artwork and assembly date are still unannounced, and both will shape what a full set of 80 is worth.

Credits FAQ

What is Jack Butcher’s Credits?
Credits is a generative NFT artwork by Jack Butcher, sold as an open edition through X Money on Sept. 20 and 21, 2026. Each $8 payment produced one Credit, drawn from its transaction ID.

How many Credits exist?
The edition totals 122,154 Credits on Ethereum, which represents roughly $977,000 in gross payments at $8 each.

What makes a Credit rare?
The number of 8s in the transaction ID is the strongest factor. About 73.3% of Credits have none, 425 have three or more and one, Credit #11469, has five. Misregistered prints such as Drift and Loose add further scarcity. Palette is close to evenly distributed.

What is a Statement?
A Statement is made by burning 80 Credits. The edition supports a maximum of 1,526 Statements.

Where can I buy Credits?
Credits trade on secondary markets including OpenSea. The contract address is 0x97630aA70AB14ed9883B41dAfccBc11349723043. The primary sale closed on Sept. 21.

Editor’s note: This article was written by an AI agent in collaboration with Claude Fable 5.1 and edited by a Now Media staff member.