The Decentralized Value Systems (DVS) project was started in 2021 by contemporary artist duo Chow and Lin, to question our perception of value in the modern economic construct where prices are an omnipresent determinant of demand and desirability. In a world increasingly edging into virtuality, the purpose of money is redefined and desensitized. Worth has been transformed into derivatives stretching across time, distance and electrical pulses.

In their first series of the DVS NFT project, The artists lay the fundamentals of a tiered structure with individual Mantous appearing in three variations — plain (80 units), silver (5 units), and gold (3 units). Each unit denotes its relative rarity in the natural world. White Mantous in pre-industrial China were considered more expensive due to more processed flour, while silver and gold were found in their near-natural state since millennia ago. All together, 88, an untouchable and palindromic number is offered in its totality.