Butcher studied graphic design at the University of Wales, Cardiff, then spent a decade at New York advertising agencies making work for clients including Ferrari, Showtime, and Godiva before running his own agency with his wife, Celia.¹ In 2019 he left agency work to start Visualize Value as a daily practice, publishing one black-and-white image distilling an idea about leverage or value each day without advertising spend.^1,5 He began releasing art on Ethereum in 2021. Two years later his Checks — 16,031 composable, collector-curated editions minted in 24 hours at $8 each — generated more than $250 million in secondary sales and was shown at Christie's during Frieze New York. That year he also released Opepen, an open-source art protocol of 16,000 tokens whose canvases evolved through collector consensus.⁵

In December 2025 Butcher presented Self Checkout at Zero 10, Art Basel Miami Beach's newly launched digital art section, paying for his own booth through Visualize Value rather than working with a gallery.^6,7 The installation paired a point-of-sale kiosk, where visitors could pay any amount by card, with a wall-mounted split-flap display that opened at a $74,211 deficit — Butcher's stated cost of taking part in the fair — and counted upward as purchases came in.^5,7 Each payment printed a receipt whose length matched the amount paid and unlocked a companion NFT.⁷ By the close of the fair the display read $114,706.51, and the work was later acquired by the X Museum in Beijing.^5,6 Critics disagreed about what the work meant: Butcher told one, “Transparency is seen as critique”, while another argued that the work reproduced, rather than subverted, the market forces it seemed to critique.^6,8

Butcher collaborated with Jalil Wahdatehagh and ygg on networked.art, an Ethereum-based auction house.⁹ With Wahdatehagh he also released Consensus Met, letting Opepen holders burn a token to mint into the new collection.¹⁰ In 2024 he showed Latent, eighty AI-generated black-and-white images paired with silver gelatin prints, at Paris Photo.^5,11 The following year Gas Wars, a set of five hundred generative combat simulations, closed out Art Blocks Curated as its penultimate release before Larva Labs' Quine.^5,12