The Curio Cards story
Thomas Hunt co-created Curio Cards in May 2017 with Travis Uhrig and Rhett Creighton — the first major art NFTs on Ethereum, three months before CryptoPunks. The cards were forgotten for four years, rediscovered in 2021, auctioned at Christie's, and have quietly become a foundation stone of NFT history.
The 1-second version: in May 2017 a small team launched 30 trading cards on Ethereum, sold them for a few dollars a piece, mostly to nobody, and the project went dormant. In 2021 somebody figured out what they actually were — pre-CryptoPunks ERC-20-and-then-some art collectibles on Ethereum — and Christie's auctioned a complete set. The cards have been quietly important to NFT history ever since.
The three creators
Thomas Hunt brought the host's network — Mad Bitcoins, WCN, the Bitcoin Group. He'd been talking to artists in the crypto space since 2014. The marketing instinct, the on-camera explainer, the connection to actual on-chain commerce — that was the show side.
Travis Uhrig wrote the smart contracts. The technical architecture predates the ERC-721 standard that became the canonical NFT contract; Curio Cards used a hybrid ERC-20 approach that was the best-available technique in early 2017. The fact that the contracts have stayed live and tradeable for almost a decade is on him.
Rhett Creighton coordinated the artists. The 30-card initial set featured work by seven artists — Phneep, Cryptograffiti, Daniel Friedman, Robek World, Marisol Vengas, Thoros of Myr, and Cryptopop — and the curation was deliberate. These were the artists already shipping in the crypto world.
Why nobody bought them in 2017
The honest answer is: NFTs were not a thing yet. The word "NFT" wouldn't have a clear meaning for another year. CryptoPunks launched in June 2017, a month after Curio Cards; CryptoKitties (which broke the term into the mainstream) wasn't until November. The cards sold for $1–4 each, the sale didn't sell out, and the founders moved on.
The 2021 rediscovery
In early 2021, NFT collectors started reverse-archaeology — what was actually the first? CryptoPunks claimed June 2017. A few people noticed that Curio Cards predated that by three months and that the contracts were still on-chain, still tradeable, with most of the supply locked in wallets that hadn't moved since launch.
The result: a Christie's auction in October 2021 of a complete set of Curio Cards. The price was reported at $1.2M. More importantly, the auction firmly seated Curio Cards in NFT history as a pre-Punks artifact.
The wiki
The story is full of people. Artists who painted under aliases. Panelists who appeared on the cards. Auctions, rediscoveries, fork projects, fan communities. Curio Wiki is the encyclopedia: 78 articles covering the creators, the artists, the projects that used Curio art, the major events. It's organized as a sidebar of categories — People, Artists, Projects, Events, Shows — and each entry is hand-edited.
The on-chain layer
Because the cards live on Ethereum, the project is also data. Curio Prices tracks the floor price history. Curio Atlas visualizes the holder network. Curio Map shows distribution. Curio Charts is the dashboard. All of it pulls from the same on-chain data, all of it lives on 1n2.org, and all of it exists because somebody co-created the cards back in 2017 and then never quite stopped paying attention.
The games using Curio art
Because the artists granted use rights to the broader project, Curio art shows up in places you wouldn't expect. The 1n2 arcade and the Mad Patrol series use card art for sprites in places. Curio Stories is the editorial side. The cards are the well; the rest of the universe drinks from it.