Eight

Dying on the Vine

The project’s own successor organisation uses the word without flinching. Curio DAO’s founders series, part one, published 10 June 2023:

“After Travis Uhrig, Thomas Hunt and Rhett Creighton released their on-chain, curated art show, despite selling a few hundred cards, they failed to generate a profit, and Curio Cards went bankrupt.”

Despite selling a few hundred cards. That is the whole commercial history in five words, written by the people who inherited the thing.

This chapter is about how that happened, and the archive is unusually good on it, because Hunt was broadcasting the failure while it occurred. He did not know it was a failure yet. He described each component of it as it arrived, on his own shows, to audiences who were not interested.

The money that was never there

Start with what the business was supposed to be, because it was not a side project in anyone’s mind in May 2017. Hunt:

“And the goal there, as you’ve noticed with the 100,000 runs is that we kind of wanted to do like an ICO. But not really an ICO. We wanted to sell these collectors cards that were the product.”

In 2017 that sentence had a specific meaning. Token sales were raising extraordinary sums for projects that had shipped nothing, and here was a team proposing to raise money by selling something that existed. The hundred-thousand-card warehouses of chapter four were the fundraising instrument. The outcome, in his words:

“So the first 10 was like a way to try to raise money for the company. And as you can sell from the sales figures, it did not raise money for the. It did not raise money.”

The stumble and the repetition are his. Chapter four has the figures that sentence is pointing at — card 1 sold 2,154 of its hundred thousand in its first week and the rest were burned, and the best week in the project’s history moved about five thousand cards at between twenty-five cents and a dollar.

He was looking for outside money very early. Two tweets from 25 May 2017, sixteen days after launch, eleven minutes apart. The first, replying to someone:

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

And then:

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

A founder tweeting call me about venture funding, with a winking emoticon, two and a half weeks in. Nobody called. The project never raised anything, and the consequence shows up in the most painful operational detail in the archive — the founding promise of chapter five, that all proceeds went to the artist, meant the company had no revenue of its own, and so:

“we weren’t in a position to buy like even 500 cards from an artist dollar that was not uh in our cards”

They could not afford to buy the artists’ cards themselves. A project whose entire pitch was supporting artists could not become a customer of its own artists, because every dollar that came in went straight out again by design. That is not a flaw in the promise; it is the promise working exactly as written, in a company with no other income.

The week the network jammed

The operational failure has a precise cause and Hunt named it on 20 July 2017, in the same conversation where Robek’s cards had just sold out:

“we didn’t have a week where we couldn’t really sell any cards because the Ethereum network was just jammed and you couldn’t process any withdrawals and no one could even buy any”

What he is describing is a week in which Ethereum was too congested to sell anything.¹

Summer 2017 is when the ICO boom made the network unusable for small transactions. Chapter four has the arithmetic of why that was fatal here specifically: calling a vending machine cost somewhere between a quarter and a half of the price of the card it dispensed, before the card. When gas prices rose, a product priced at twenty-five cents became a product where the fee exceeded the item. There is no version of the Curio Cards business that survives expensive gas, and 2017 was the year gas got expensive.

Robek, on the same call, put the demand side of it as a sketch about his grandmother trying to open a Coinbase account to buy a quarter’s worth of pictures. Then he gave the general principle:

“So I mean this stuff is basically I mean Ethereum isn’t or Ether isn’t a currency right it’s a fuel and so if you it the more expensive ether is the less likely fun stuff like this can happen”

The less likely fun stuff like this can happen. An artist, two days after his sell-out, correctly diagnosing why the thing he had just succeeded at was not going to keep working.

Hunt’s response was to consider leaving the chain, which is a remarkable thing to find a co-founder of the first art NFT project on Ethereum saying in July 2017:

“what we’d actually look at with Kerio cards is like Robek is saying the Ethereum network is becoming too crowded Ethereum has like the ICOs that come through and crash the whole market and make it so you can’t even use Ethereum”

“so we would look into a similar network like Ethereum that has smart contracts and then of course we would we would either move the old cards with us or we would give a bunch of the new cards to anyone that holds the old cards we’re certainly not going to leave the people behind”

They did not go. Chapter three is about the first time they nearly left Ethereum and why they stayed; this was the second time, and the reasoning that saved the project in both cases was the same reasoning — that cards on an abandoned chain are not cards. Had they moved in the autumn of 2017, there would have been nothing at a findable address in March 2021, and no book.

Thirty ICOs and no lawyers

Running underneath the money problem was a fear, and both surviving founders describe it independently, which is the strongest kind of corroboration this archive offers.

Hunt:

“So when we did the 30 Kerio cards for a long time, we were afraid that we had done 30 ICOs. And they were going to come get us, right?”

“And plus we didn’t make any money. And we didn’t have any lawyers.”

Uhrig, separately, in a different interview:

“Yeah we were like no no no we’re going to crank up baseball cards and we’re going to do 20 or 30 different runs of individual baseball cards and there was a time where I actually worried kind of like a liability like that we had actually created like 30 different ICOs basically.”

The fear was structural, not paranoid. The design decision of chapter four — one ERC-20 contract per card, thirty-one separate token launches — is, viewed from a certain angle, indistinguishable from having conducted thirty-one token sales. In 2017 nobody knew where the line was. They had no counsel and no money to retain any, and the archive shows them going to find out the hard way: on 30 August 2017 both founders attended a panel in San Francisco called Bitcoin Legal Panel — The SEC and You.

That evening is also where the project’s obscurity gets measured on the record, and it is brutal. Justin Holl, the venue’s community manager, working the room before the panel:

“Thank you, Travis. How many of you have traded Curio cards? How many of you have heard of Curio cards? Okay, well two of your hosts here tonight are both working on a project on a blockchain called Curio cards. So now you know.”

So now you know. He asks a room of San Francisco crypto people, in the city where the project was built, who has traded the cards — then retreats to whether anyone has even heard of them, and then has to explain what they are. Two of the evening’s hosts were its founders. This is three and a half months after launch, in the project’s home town, in front of exactly the audience it was built for.

He had tried the same question two months earlier, at a different event on 28 June 2017:

“How many of you own your curio cards? Okay, we’ll maybe make that row too.”

Uhrig’s pitch that August night, delivered as master of ceremonies with about thirty seconds, is the project in its own words at the moment it was still trying:

“This is the project that Justin hinted at earlier. I’m doing this because we just launched our new website today. Project is called CurioCards. I’m not going to take a lot of time. your curious system, talk to me later. The short version is a platform for artists to sell their work digitally online.”

The content survives whole: they relaunched the website on 30 August 2017, and the one-line description of Curio Cards from the man running it was a platform for artists to sell their work digitally online. Not the first art NFTs. Not a historic collection. A platform for artists to sell work online — which is what it was, and which in 2017 nobody wanted.

The sound of it stopping

The decline is legible in the record as a change in rhythm rather than an announcement.

Chapter four shows the Tuesdays as a metronome through May, June and early July, and shows the tiered pricing being abandoned that summer to reduce Creighton’s unpaid workload. Then the last few cards go up, and the tone of the announcements changes. On 1 August 2017, card 26 — the 111-copy card that chapter five shows becoming the bottleneck for the entire collection:

“We also launched new @MyCurioCards today and #26 is already SOLD OUT! https://mycuriocards.com/ #ethereum #tradingcards collection incomplete!”

Collection incomplete. Written as a marketing hook, read now as a prophecy about complete sets that would not be assemblable for four years.

Card 30 went up on 23 August 2017. And then on 26 September 2017, four words and a handle:

“Collecting is intensely human. @MyCurioCards”

That is the last substantive thing Hunt posts about Curio Cards in 2017. It is not a sign-off; it reads like a man saying the true thing he believes about the idea, to nobody, after the Tuesdays have stopped being reliable. Chapter fifteen comes back to it.

The quantitative version is in the archive itself. Own-account Curio posts by year, counted in brain.db: 2017, dozens. 2018, four. 2019, none. 2020, none.

Dying on the vine

Which brings this chapter to the sentence it is named for, said on 20 July 2017 — the single best day in the project’s commercial life, hosting the artist whose cards had sold out in twenty-four hours:

“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. Chapter six covers the context; what belongs here is the arithmetic. Card 20, MadBitcoins, by Phneep — the project’s own site reports 1,547 sold of a supply the chain records as 2,000, and Christie’s lists 2,000, which is one more disagreement for the apparatus. Either way, roughly a quarter of the run never moved. Robek’s three cards, released a week later, cleared 1,250 cards in a day to about eight buyers.

And the right way to read “dying on the vine” is not as self-pity. It is a man describing his own product’s sell-through accurately, in public, while promoting the one thing that worked. The commercial reality of Curio Cards was fully visible to the people running it by July 2017 and they said so out loud on a livestream, and for four years nobody listened closely enough for it to matter.

Uhrig’s summary, given to Amy Castor and David Gerard years later, is the flattest statement of it anywhere:

“It was a fun thing at the time, but kinda failed in a lot of ways getting any traction,”

They add the detail that does the most damage: he “could barely give the virtual cards away on a Discord channel.”

Departure, in three tenses

Hunt’s exit is not announced anywhere. It is visible in grammar.

19 January 2018, prompted by a caller asking about CryptoKitties:

“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.”

We tried. They’re still working on it. One sentence, two pronouns, and he has moved himself out of the project. A week later, on 26 January 2018:

“And again, we almost had that idea. We were really close, I think, at, it’s called Curio Cards and they’re still working on it at my Curio Cards. And those were just like baseball cards that were linked to a token. So they were cryptographically proven unique and you could trade them around. And I thought was a fun idea.”

We almost had that idea. We were really close. He is describing his own project — deployed, sold, live on chain, named in a standards document he is about to find out about — as an idea they nearly had. And by 24 July 2018 the handover is explicit:

“For a little while last year, I was working on a project called CurioCards. My friend Travis is still running it and still trying to get it off the ground. CurioCards were collectible cards on Ethereum.”

For a little while last year. Fourteen months after launch, one of its three founders refers to Curio Cards in the past tense, as something he did briefly, which a friend is still trying to get off the ground.

Chapter nine is about what Travis Uhrig did with it alone for the next three years, and about the exact moment the thing Hunt had stopped mentioning became the most interesting object in early NFT history.