One

Joey Coin

Ask Thomas Hunt when Curio Cards started and the answer smears across two years.

“It was 2016, 2017, and I’d always been a collector.”

That is the first thing he says, in June 2021, when Adam McBride asks him how he got involved. It is not evasion; it is what the beginning of a project actually feels like from inside. The chain can tell you that card 1 went up at 17:22:51 UTC on 9 May 2017, and the chain is right, but nobody experiences an idea arriving at a timestamp.

The second half of that sentence is the part that matters, and he returns to it constantly. He had collected baseball cards in the 1980s, comic books in the 1990s, then CDs and DVDs, films and music. He told Bitcoin.com the same thing in June 2017, when the project was six weeks old and he was its only public face:

“I’ve always been a collector. I collected baseball cards, books, movies and now of course cryptocurrency. People love to collect things, so I thought, why not combine my love for cryptocurrency with my love for collecting and make something fun.”

In January 2018, with the project already behind him, he put it less brightly and more precisely:

“But the idea that we tried to develop with Kerio cards and they’re still working on its at Kerio cards or at my Kerio cards and you can check them out is that tokens could be unique like baseball cards. And I’ve always been a baseball card collector and then a book collector and then video game collector and whatever else and movies and things.”

Four years of distance does not change the account at all. It is the most stable thing he says about Curio Cards across nine years of talking about it, and it is the least technical: tokens could be unique like baseball cards.

The intellectual version of the idea, by his telling, came from someone else, on his own show.

Hunt had been broadcasting about Bitcoin since April 2013. The trigger for that was Cyprus — the March 2013 banking crisis, where large depositors took a forced loss and ordinary people were locked out of the ATMs. He describes watching it and making a connection:

“And it’s at that time that I made the connection between Bitcoin and Cypress. And while the people of Cypress didn’t have ATMs, Bitcoin ATMs, they didn’t have knowledge and meet-up groups and access. They didn’t know how to use Bitcoin. But if they did, they would have had this wonderful off ramp, this wonderful safety net that could have saved them from the banks giving them a haircut”

That is the conversion story, and it is a standard one for its cohort. What is less standard is what he says happened next: that over the following years, interviewing people on World Crypto Network, he heard Andreas Antonopoulos say something that lodged. The idea, as Hunt recounts it:

“He said that at some point there is going to be Joey coin. And the kids on the yard will have Joey coin and they’ll have Freddie coin and Joey’s more popular than Freddie.”

Kids in a playground, issuing their own tokens, with their own relative values. Hunt tells this story in at least three separate interviews, which is how you can tell it is load-bearing. It is not, strictly, an idea about art, or about collecting, or about scarcity. It is an idea about the moment when issuing a token becomes so cheap that a child can do it for fun — and about what people will immediately do with that, which is trade them, and rank them, and want the rare ones.

There is no recording of the original Antonopoulos remark in the archive, and this book does not claim to have found one. What it has is Hunt’s repeated attribution of the seed of Curio Cards to a guest on his own programme, which is a characteristic thing for him to say and probably true.

The proximate model was Rare Pepe, and Hunt’s relationship to it is the most analytically interesting thing he says about the design.

Rare Pepe was a collection of trading cards built on Counterparty, a protocol layered on top of Bitcoin, which let you issue tokens by writing metadata into Bitcoin transactions. The first RAREPEPE card was issued in September 2016 in an edition of 300, and by early 2017 there were hundreds of them, submitted by anonymous artists, curated by a committee, and traded in a wallet built by Joe Looney. They were cards. They were scarce. They were art, after a fashion. They worked, and they predated Curio Cards by eight months.

They were also, Hunt thought, strategically doomed, and he can tell you exactly why. Pepe the Frog had by 2017 been thoroughly appropriated by the American far right — the Anti-Defamation League had declared it a hate symbol the previous September. The palette was all green. The card frames were a tight parody of Magic: The Gathering. It was a brilliant inside joke that could only ever be an inside joke.

“So I thought that there was very obvious opportunity for a cartoony mascot that had no hate in it.”

Hence a raccoon. The mascot came off Fiverr for five dollars, with a brief Hunt describes like this:

“I was it first, first take five bucks. I described I wanted the mask to look like an eight. The guy had a cartoony feeling like I just thought it was great.”

The mask that looks like an eight is the raccoon’s natural eye-marking, redrawn as a sideways infinity symbol. It is a nice piece of design thinking for five dollars, and it is also — flagging this now because the book will have to deal with it properly later — the subject of one of the two or three genuine credit disputes in the whole story. Travis Uhrig, on the project’s sixth anniversary, described the same mascot and said: “He has that infinity symbol around his eyes, just as I suggested and described.” He said it in an interview with Hunt present, and Hunt did not contradict him. Both men agree the raccoon was Hunt’s idea. Both appear to claim the mask. There is no way to settle it and this book does not pretend otherwise.

Travis Uhrig’s account of where Curio Cards came from is different from Hunt’s, and better.

Asked the same question in May 2021, he did not reach for a single origin. He gave a genealogy:

“what Curio was essentially had like three parents one of his parents was rare Pepe’s another one was the Bitcoin art show that we were doing and the Bitcoin crack show that happened before that and just the idea of like there are people out there who are like creating art about Bitcoin or selling it for Bitcoin and then the other parent was Doge Dogecoin.”

Three parents: Rare Pepe, the art show, Dogecoin.¹ It is the single most useful sentence anyone says about the project’s lineage, because it names the two ancestors that Hunt’s version tends to leave out.

The art show is chapter two’s business. Dogecoin is worth a moment here, because it is the one nobody mentions.

Dogecoin in 2014 and 2015 was the demonstration that a cryptocurrency could be a joke and still work — that the tipping, the sincerity, the silliness and the community were not a dilution of the technology but the reason anyone showed up. By 2017 Bitcoin culture had largely lost that. The ICO boom was selling fifty-million-dollar visions written in the register of a prospectus. Uhrig is explicit that Curio was a reaction:

“Because we wanted it to be fun wanted to be kind of silly wanted to be like very low stress very chill the first website was like block a blogger you know the first mascot wasn’t in the off fiber it was a cartoon character that you thought of it was we wanted to keep it fun and simple because like everyone was getting real serious at the time”

Two things in that are worth pulling out. The phrase “block a blogger” refers to the site being built on Blogger — verifiably true of buycuriocards.com, archived in August 2017 as a Blogspot site with a blog ID and everything. And Uhrig appears to be saying the first mascot was not the one commissioned from Fiverr, which contradicts Hunt’s account of the raccoon directly.² Neither man has been asked about it since, so the disagreement is logged rather than settled.

His “everyone was getting real serious at the time” is the correct read of mid-2017. While Curio Cards was selling pictures of apples for a quarter, the Ethereum network around it was being used to raise a hundred and fifty million dollars for a browser, and two hundred and thirty-two million for a project that had not shipped anything. Curio’s two-hundred-thousand-dollar fundraising ambition — which it missed, badly — was not merely modest. In the context of the summer of 2017, it was eccentric.

Uhrig’s other contribution to the genealogy is the problem the project was supposed to solve, and he states it in a way Hunt never quite does. From an interview reprinted in the project’s own founders series:

“if you’re a digital artist, there’s no way to make money on your work — not directly.”

and:

“In my mind, Bitcoin needed artists… That’s how you solve the UI problem. You get any kind of creative person involved.”

Two different motivations, then, pointing the same way. Hunt wanted the thing he had wanted since he was eight: a set to complete, with rare ones in it. Uhrig wanted a payment rail for digital artists and thought art was how a hostile technology acquires a human face. The promise that ended up on the front page of mycuriocards.com, and in Hunt’s very first public description of the project on The Bitcoin Group in June 2017, belongs to Uhrig’s half of the idea rather than Hunt’s:

“all proceeds from the sales of these cards go directly to the artist.”

It is worth saying plainly, since much of what follows is about failure, that this part was not marketing. The artists were paid, and chapter five sets out the evidence — including Hunt confirming a transfer on air, in July 2017, in front of the artist who had received it.

One last thing belongs in this chapter, because it dates the ambition precisely and because it is the only place in the archive where the gap between what Curio Cards was and what its founder hoped it would be is visible in a single line.

On 25 May 2017 — sixteen days after launch, with cards 1 to 3 already sold out and burned — Hunt was arguing with someone on Twitter and let this slip:

“nah. I still really like Curio Cards and would like to raise VC to help spread and develop the idea further.”

Eleven minutes later, at 16:32 UTC, he tweeted into the void:

“work or VC funding for Curio Cards. Call me. ;)”

Nobody called.