Two

Free Beer and Pizza

Everything in this story runs through a monthly meetup in San Francisco, and the best single detail about that meetup is a logistical one.

“And one of the other neat things about San Francisco is that you have to provide free beer and pizza. Otherwise the startup people will not come.”

Hunt says this in June 2021 and then describes engineers taking three slices at a time. It is a throwaway line and it does more work than it looks like. The San Francisco Bitcoin Meetup was not a conference, a company or a fund. It was a room you had to bribe people to enter, run by volunteers, where the attendance was a function of catering. Every relationship that produced Curio Cards was formed there.

It was run, when Hunt arrived, by two women he names in the same breath:

“Travis I knew Travis from the San Francisco Bitcoin meetup and Travis had been coming to the meetups as I had Isabella Isabelle and page ran the meetup.”

Isabelle and Paige ran it. Hunt came as an attendee, became an organiser, and then recruited Travis Uhrig as an organiser in turn. That sequence is worth holding onto, because it means the two men who started Curio Cards did not meet as founders looking for a cofounder. They met because one of them was putting out chairs.

Uhrig’s own memory of the introduction is better than Hunt’s, and it is the most endearing thing either of them says about the other. From an interview reprinted in the project’s founders series:

“I remember, when I met Mad Bitcoins, it was like, ‘Oh my gosh,’ I just had a drink with the Mad Bitcoins. I had no idea he lived around here. It’s the guy from the internet. It’s the guy from the show that I watch every week.”

This is 2015 or 2016, in a bar, and one of them is a minor internet celebrity to the other. The asymmetry matters later, when the question of who founded what becomes genuinely contested and nine different sources give nine different org charts.

Some of the planning happened at the meetup proper and some at a spin-off the archive names precisely: “Proof of Drink”, sponsored by Coinbase, held at a Mission District bar called El Rio. The project’s own account says the three of them worked out how Curio Cards would function there. It is a good detail and it is second-hand — the founders series is the project writing about itself, and most of its quotes are lifted from podcasts rather than gathered in fresh interviews. Treat El Rio as reported, not as documented.

The art show

The thing that turned a meetup into a project was an art show, and the earliest statement of that is also the most reliable, because it was made in public while it was still true.

On 30 August 2017, at a venue called DG717 on Market Street, there was a panel event about the SEC. Before the panel there was an open mic for announcements, and Travis Uhrig signed himself up. He had about thirty seconds:

“The short version is a platform for artists to sell their work digitally online.”

“And we’re really excited about creating these very useful and helpful for the art community. We did a Bitcoin art show last year, and it’s kind of borne out of what we learned from that.”

A platform for artists to sell their work digitally online. That is the elevator pitch, from a cofounder, four months after launch, with no retrospective varnish on it at all. And the origin claim is right there too: a Bitcoin art show the previous year, 2016, and Curio Cards “borne out of what we learned from that.”

The project’s own repository README, written much later, says the same thing in cleaner prose and adds the organisational detail:

“The project came out of discussions around digital scarcity, limitations for artists selling digital artwork, and expanding on the San Francisco Bitcoin Meetup Groups’ Annual Art Show.”

The founders series gives the show a name — Proof of Art — and dates it to 2016, describing it as showcasing Bitcoin artists to collectors at a local gallery. The archive adds that the organisers helped paint the gallery space themselves, and that a smaller “craft show” had run a couple of years earlier. There was already precedent in the city: a hacker house called 20Mission had a gallery selling art for Bitcoin before any of this.

So the sequence is: a meetup, then a craft show, then an art show in a gallery the organisers painted, then the idea that the show could be permanent and online. Curio Cards is sometimes described as an art project that happened to use a blockchain. It is more accurate to say it was a gallery show that ran out of walls.

cryptograffiti walks up

The first artist was not recruited. He volunteered, at the meetup, by introducing himself.

cryptograffiti — lower case, always — was a Bay Area street artist who made work about cryptocurrency: collages from shredded cash, mosaics of credit-card detritus, parodies of bank logos. By 2017 he was the best-known artist in the Bitcoin world, such as that was. The archive’s account is that he came up at a meetup and said he made art about crypto, and that he was then part of the planning conversations about how the cards would work — not merely a supplier of images but a participant in the design.

He got cards 11, 12 and 13, and he was the first artist whose cards went on sale. Hunt’s announcement of it on The Bitcoin Group #145 on 9 June 2017 is the earliest public explanation of Curio Cards anywhere in the archive; chapter five quotes it in full, but this is the clause that matters here:

“This week’s cards are Crypto Graffiti cards and all proceeds from the sales of these cards go directly to the artist.”

The artist’s own reaction survives, on Twitter, timestamped 6 June 2017 at 21:34 UTC:

“Honored to be chosen as 1st #CurioCards artist! Verifiably limited-edition trading cards avail at”

Card 12 is a 1990s MasterCard logo with “MineBitcoin” in place of “MasterCard”. Card 11 is BTC Keys; card 13 is BTC. Hunt, describing the set on air six years later, could not remember which banks they parodied — “It’s a parody of one of those British banks. I forget which one” — which is a small thing, but it is the kind of small thing this book keeps having to note. The founders remember the feeling of 2017 vividly and the facts of it unreliably.

There is one more detail about cryptograffiti’s three cards, and it belongs later in the book: of all thirty, they are the ones built on other companies’ trademarks. Whether that is why they are reportedly absent from the two-page Curio spread in Taschen’s On NFTs is a question this book could not answer. The research found nothing supporting the story and nothing refuting it. It is plausible — cards 11 to 13 are exactly the ones a publisher’s lawyer would ask about — and plausibility is not evidence, so it stays in the open-questions list at the back.

Rhett Creighton

Neither Hunt nor Uhrig could write a smart contract. The third founder arrived by double recommendation.

“But so Rick knows everybody in town ricks my like startup guy. And Rick and Ryan both suggest that I meet Rhett Creighton.”

Rick Chan and Ryan Singer, both advisors to the project, independently pointed Hunt at the same person. Hunt’s description of him is a small masterpiece of résumé-forwarding:

“Rhett is a nuclear engineer trained at MIT. So if you’re looking to be impressed by a little resume, nuclear engineer trained at MIT comes comes off pretty good for a programmer, right?”

And then, a beat later:

“He’s the little kid in crocodile done to you too. So he is a major child actor.”

Crocodile Dundee II. Hunt immediately compares it to Brock Pierce in The Mighty Ducks, a reach for a precedent that says a lot about the industry. Creighton was also, by 2017, known in cryptocurrency for having forked Zcash into Zclassic to remove the founders’ reward — which is to say he was someone with a demonstrated willingness to rewrite other people’s economics on principle.

What he did for Curio Cards, Hunt is consistently clear about, and consistently generous:

“We might come up with the framework and we may discuss them, but Rhett’s the one that makes them happen when it comes to the vending machine that you send money to and it comes out with a card that’s Rhett.”

“And I can say it as an idea. It should be a baseball card. But Rhett, the one that made them baseball card. It worked.”

That second quote is missing a verb and is better for it. Uhrig, years later, put the technical problem in terms that make the scale of it obvious:

“Rhett had to figure out how to make an NFT on Ethereum from scratch. And the only thing that really existed at the time was this type of token called an ERC-20 token, which was used for ICOs. It’s just your basic fungible token. And he had to turn that into a non-divisible, rare collectible, and he also put them into these things we called vending machines, which let anybody be able to send money to Ethereum and get art back. And that’s now how minting works in the ERC-721 Token Standard.”

And Hunt, flatly:

“Rhett created a smart contract for it. He had to make the whole thing work; there were no best practices or standards, or existing frameworks that we could use.”

The roles, as Hunt lays them out, were: Creighton on the technology, Uhrig on business development and fundraising, Hunt on promotion through his shows.

“And so we had rent on as the tech. Then we brought Travis on as kind of like business development to help us get some VC, make some speeches, spread the word about curio cards.”¹

The one thing Rhett Creighton has ever said about it

Creighton left in 2017 and has declined to discuss the project ever since. This is not a rhetorical flourish; the research found exactly one statement from him about Curio Cards anywhere, given to a Curio DAO contributor and printed in the founders series in July 2023. It is reproduced here in full because it is all there is:

“My involvement ended in 2017 and I have no comment on the project beyond that. My mother is an artist and collected tchotchkes in a curio cabinet when I was growing up (which is just a coincidence). I’m sure many other people have artist or collector family members so that is something many people can relate to.”

Three sentences, two of which are a refusal and one of which is a denial of a coincidence nobody had accused him of. It is a strange and rather affecting piece of text. The man who wrote the contracts that the ERC-721 authors would later name, whose work is the only part of Curio Cards that still exists exactly as it was made, has nothing to say about any of it, and wants it noted that the curio cabinet means nothing.

His absence has had consequences for the record. In June 2021, the interviewer talking to Hunt mentioned he had been trying to reach Creighton for three weeks and had not managed it. Nine years on, questions that only Creighton can answer are still open — including the single most consequential technical question in the story, which Hunt raises himself and cannot answer:

“But for whatever reason when he sat down to program it, he didn’t include version numbers”

No version numbers in the contracts. Which is why, when a duplicate deployment happened in June 2017, there was no way to tell from the chain which of two identically named contracts was the real card 17 — and why, four years later, the duplicate could be rediscovered, argued over, given a name, sold at Christie’s, and nearly split the community.

Nobody knows why the version numbers are missing. The one person who does is not saying.