Six

The Wizard, the Bard and the Barbarian

On Tuesday 18 July 2017, Curio Cards released three cards by an artist called Robek World. Card 21 was The Wizard, card 22 The Bard, card 23 The Barbarian. They sold out in about a day — the only cards in the project’s history that did — and two days later the artist came on Mad Bitcoins to talk about it.

That interview is the single most valuable primary source in this entire archive. It is contemporaneous, it is two voices only so attribution is tractable, and it was recorded at the one moment when Curio Cards was working. Nobody involved knew it was the high-water mark. The recording opens “Today is Thursday, July 20th, 2017”, and the file is dated the 21st, so it was made on the Thursday and published on the Friday. Everything in this chapter comes from it unless marked otherwise.

Hunt’s introduction:

“But we are joined by the amazing rowback from rowback’s world who’s here to tell us about his my Curio cards.”¹

Robek’s first words, which is how we know which voice is which for the rest of the recording:

“Hey, hey, everybody. Glad to be on Mad Bitcoins. And I’m happy to talk about Curio cards.”

Three faces

Then Hunt shares his screen, and in four sentences establishes both what the cards were and who was in them:

“Now just a couple of days ago on Tuesday, I think it was we did a little Curio card for you. And you made cars that happen to have a little resemblance to some people that I know. This one kind of looks like mad bitcoins. This one kind of looks like my buddy Travis. And this one like my buddy red. He’s even winking at me and flexing as I know it’s right now.”²

So: the Wizard is Thomas Hunt, the Bard is Travis Uhrig, the Barbarian is Rhett Creighton, and the Barbarian is winking and flexing. Three fantasy caricatures of the three founders, released as the project’s twenty-first, twenty-second and twenty-third cards, four years before anyone had a word for a profile-picture collection.

It was Robek’s idea to make them that way, and he describes the thinking with the slight embarrassment of a cartoonist explaining a joke:

“So this is kind of the second version of a set idea I had. And it’s fun. Just kind of loosely basing them off of you guys. And certain regards because you know, there’s you can do straight up fantasy or whatever, but I’m more of a cartoonist. And so I knew that I’m not going to be able to do something beautiful like magic, the gathering. So at least try to try to keep it fun.”

He also chose not to label them, which is the detail that makes the cards work:

“I mean I didn’t say and these cards are based off of mad bitcoins and Travis like I didn’t feel like that was appropriate like typically I know right would have bigger muscles but I just you know I wanted to leave some things up people’s imagination”

The joke buried in there — that Rhett would normally be drawn with bigger muscles — is the sort of aside that only survives in an unedited recording.

And on why he made them for Curio specifically rather than reaching for existing work:

“I just wanted to make something that was fun and that was unique and original for curious cards not something that I already had my back pocket and not something that was just going to be have no connection so that’s why I liked that I asked you guys what what you wanted to be”

“curious cards” is Curio Cards. He asked them what they wanted to be. That is a commission run backwards — the artist interviewing the founders about their own self-image — and it produced the only cards the project ever sold out.

The car, before breakfast

The best thing in the archive is what happened next, told by the person it happened to:

“Well, I went to bed and woke up the next day and I didn’t eat any breakfast because didn’t have any food and gone grocery shopping. I got into the car and I realized I hadn’t checked the sales. So I checked them. And they were gone. All of them, but 19, which I bought because I wanted some of my own cards.”

An artist with no food in the house, sitting in his car, checking his phone, finding that his entire edition had sold overnight.

The “but 19” needs a note, because it reads two ways and only one of them is possible. Card 19 exists — it is Dogs Trading, by Cryptopop — but it is not Robek’s card and he could not have been talking about his own sell-out in terms of someone else’s. So “19” is a count: nineteen copies remained unsold, and he bought those himself. He says why in the same breath: “because I wanted some of my own cards.” The artist of the only sold-out set in Curio Cards history had to buy his own work off the vending machine to own any of it.

His own assessment, immediately after:

“It was pretty pretty incredible. Wasn’t expecting it to sell out in 24 hours or at all. But it means a lot. So super excited.”

Or at all. He had not expected to sell out in a day, and he had not expected to sell out ever. Neither had Hunt, who volunteers something that in hindsight is almost unbearable — a co-founder, two days after his project’s only success, explaining that he had predicted it would fail:

“I thought it was fun I actually thought that they wouldn’t sell out because they had our faces on them I thought that would be a detriment so I thought you took a major risk there”

He thought having the founders’ faces on the cards would put buyers off. It was the only thing that ever worked.

What it was worth

Here is where this chapter has to be careful, because the obvious question — how much did Robek make? — has no documented answer, only a documented range.

What is established: cards 21 and 22 have an on-chain totalSupply of 500 each and card 23 has 250, which comes to 1,250 cards. All proceeds went to the artist; chapter five sets out the evidence that this was honoured, including Hunt saying on this very call that Rhett had sent the ether to Robek’s account and “the artist has been paid the money.” And on this same call, Hunt gives the price:

“so that’s the gas limit for the cards oh I don’t know the technical things the cards cost around 25 cents in American dollars whatever that is.”

Twelve hundred and fifty cards at around twenty-five cents is around three hundred dollars. If some sold at the higher tiers — the project had used a quarter, fifty cents and a dollar for earlier cards, though it had standardised on a dollar by this point to reduce Rhett’s deployment workload — the figure could run to four figures. That range, three hundred to roughly twelve hundred dollars, is this book’s arithmetic from documented supplies and a quoted price, not a figure anyone has reported. No payment record is public. It is given here as a bound, not a number.

Which is the real scale of the thing. The best week in the history of the first art NFT collection on Ethereum paid an artist somewhere in the mid-hundreds of dollars, and he was so pleased that he told a live stream it meant a lot to him, and he had no groceries.

And Robek was clear-eyed about why it could not get bigger. The constraint was not demand; it was gas, a point he makes twice — once as a principle, which chapter eight takes up, and once by acting out the onboarding problem. The second is 2017’s entire user-experience failure in one sentence:

“or like people are I’m like hey grandma you want to buy some my career cards she’s like yeah sure let me figure out how to get on coin base and then verify my account and oh shit it’s $300 for one e ether ethereum I can’t I can’t spend that”³

To buy a twenty-five-cent picture, grandma must open a Coinbase account, complete identity verification, and buy a three-hundred-dollar unit of ether. The gas alone was punishing: Robek works out that the vending machine’s gas limit was “like 57k … which is like half of the cost of or like a fourth of the cost of the card.” A quarter to a half of the purchase price, spent on the privilege of purchasing.

The whale

Then Hunt does something that in 2017 almost nobody thought to do on a live stream: he reads the chain on air.

“We went back and we we looked at the Ethereum logs and it tells us that someone came along and they bought around 336 of card 21 and about the same of the other cards, maybe less of card 23 because that was a very rare card. It was only 250 printing and kind of an anime like a foil packed card.”

One buyer took roughly 336 of the 500 copies of card 21, and comparable quantities of the others. Robek, who has clearly been looking at the same data, states the consequence:

“Yeah. So actually, these are all kind of all really rare cards now as only about eight people hold all of them total combined.”

Eight holders. That is the complete collector base for the only successful drop in the project’s history: one large buyer, a handful of others, and the artist, who bought nineteen of his own.

The large buyer has never been identified. Not in 2017, and not since. Hunt, years later, still:

“we still don’t know this is still a mystery to us a true true mystery”

He had spent years privately suspecting Rick Chan — the San Francisco startup connector who introduced him to Rhett Creighton in the first place — and that suspicion turned out to be wrong. Robek, separately, reports a second unidentified large holder:

“There’s another whale and I don’t know who that is.”

So the position is this. A collection now in the permanent record of two major auction houses had, in its single best week, around eight buyers, of whom at least one and probably two were large and remain anonymous to the founders nine years later. Every transaction is public. The addresses are right there. Nobody has ever matched them to a person.

One warning about supply numbers, since they matter here. Asked later how many of each Robek card existed, Hunt guessed “300, 200, 100”. Travis Uhrig corrected him in real time, reading the official page out loud: “I’m on the website right now… while there’s 522, there’s only 250 of the 23s”. The chain says 500, 500 and 250. Hunt’s guess was wrong on all three, and the figures used above are the chain’s.

The foil card

Card 23, The Barbarian, was different, and the difference is a claim this book declines to make.

Robek had asked for something extra:

“But I wanted to do something a little bit extra and I’ve been talking to you guys and like Travis and everybody over the CURE team for a while and had a couple ideas for holographics like foil cards that you get in your Pokemon packs or something like that.”

“the CURE team” is the Curio team. The reference is to the chase card in a trading-card pack — the rare foil you hope for — and he built the digital equivalent by animating it, within a constraint he explains precisely:

“And this one was a test one. We wanted to kind of see how much we could get animated without increasing the file size so much. So this is a simple two frame one.”

Two frames. The file-size limit was not arbitrary; Hunt explains it in the same conversation:

“But low, low file size is definitely important because we’re using IPFS to store the images. So it’s a distributed network and you want to have the tightest file you have.”

So the rarest card in the only sold-out set in Curio Cards history is a two-frame animation, kept to two frames because the images were pinned on IPFS in 2017 and nobody wanted to find out what happened to a large file.

Hunt has wondered aloud whether it was the first animated NFT, and the way he wonders is why this book trusts him on texture even where it will not follow him on numbers:

“and I don’t know the history and all that but maybe it’s the first animated NFT I don’t know it was hard to do you can see there aren’t a lot of frames”

Twice hedged in one sentence. The claim is plausible and this book does not assert it: establishing it would require an exhaustive survey of 2017 token artwork that nobody has done, and chapter fourteen explains why priority claims in this period are harder than they look. What can be said is narrower and still interesting — that in July 2017 an artist and a project deliberately built a scarce animated collectible, reasoned about its file size because of where it had to be stored, and shipped it.

How he got there at all

Robek was not recruited through the Google form. He arrived the way almost everyone in this story arrived, through one person who knew everyone:

“Well I’m actually just a tag along my good friend Moon who you guys have been talking to for a while. He came and visited me and Austin”

“So anyway that’s the case that he got me into this decentralization stuff and then he came to visit we had like a meetup and he was like oh yeah by the way he should check out the Curio cards stuff.”

Moon — who also, elsewhere in the archive, built the project a gallery — visited Austin, held a meetup, and mentioned Curio Cards in passing. Oh yeah, by the way.

Before he was an artist for them, Robek tried to trade against them, and he confesses it on the stream with no apparent concern:

“And so then I figured out that you guys accidentally released a card a little bit earlier and then I bought them and then I was like I’m going to sell these on the black market early and and no one in either delta even know how to look up a card. If it was supposed to be leaked early and then it ended up being card 10 which is your reserve anyway so it it was a big giant.”

“either delta” is EtherDelta; the sentence trails off unfinished. The scheme: the project deployed a card early by accident, he noticed, bought the lot, and planned to flip it on EtherDelta into a market where nobody knew how to find a token by contract address. It failed because the card was card 10, which the project held in reserve. Hunt’s response is the flattest line in the interview:

“Yeah didn’t really didn’t really pan out here you’re unable to corner the market on that one that didn’t go well.”

Two months later the same man had the project’s only sold-out set.

There is one more production detail, and it is the most 2017 sentence in the archive. Robek could not attend his own launch stream:

“No so the video was made because I was wanted to be on the launch and turned out had board review meetings at the real life that same day at the same time as the new cards Tuesday and so it’s like shit so I wanted to put something together that you guys could could have.”

“at the real life” — he had a day job with board meetings. So he recorded a promotional video instead:

“So I recorded the audio and then I was like okay I’ve got time I can hand animate this in three days and then I just stole things from other people that from archive so hopefully there’s a nice gray area”

Hand-animated in three days, around a job, with public-domain material he describes, cheerfully and on the record, as a nice grey area.

He also noticed something on the replay that nobody followed up:

“I went back and watch the stream and Travis was like oh is there a goblin king and well I mean it could be fun if we make all these cards kind of line up in some way”

A goblin king. The idea that the cards might share a world, raised as a throwaway on a livestream in July 2017, five years before every NFT collection in existence had a lore document. It went nowhere. The project had four months left.

Dying on the vine

And then, in the middle of all this, Hunt says the thing that this chapter is really about.

Card 20 is MadBitcoins, by Phneep — Hunt’s own card, released before Robek’s, with a supply of 2,000. Card 21 is Robek’s Wizard, which is also a Mad Bitcoins card, which is a confusion the apparatus flags as the likeliest place for this book to have made an error. Robek’s cards sold out in a day. Hunt’s did not sell at all:

“So yeah and we do have other cards that are available on the website including mad Bitcoin’s cards which didn’t sell out RobEx World cards sell out mad Bitcoin’s cards nothing just sitting there dying on the vine.”

“RobEx World” is Robek World. A founder, hosting the artist whose cards sold out, on his own show, telling his own audience that his own card is sitting there dying on the vine.

It is the funniest line in the archive and the saddest, and it is the alternative title of this book for a reason. Three months after launch, the project’s commercial reality was visible to the man running it and he said it out loud on a livestream, in a sentence nobody wrote down for four years.

Robek’s reply, immediately before the passage about the artist being paid, was to try to fix it on air — “Yeah you guys should you guys should but go buy some of his cards so that way I don’t feel bad about cash now” — and nobody did. Card 20’s final tally, as the project’s own site reports it, is 1,547 of 2,000 sold, and even that figure disagrees with Christie’s, which lists 2,000.

What happened over the following three months is chapter eight.