Eleven

The Thirteenth of March

Three things were dug up in one week of March 2021, and the man doing the digging has described the sequence:

“And then the MoonCats happened in March, and then Curio [Cards] happened the next day, and Etheria happened like two days later,” he said, “man, and I was in the rabbit hole 10, 12 hours a day hunting, because I wanted to find my own MoonCats.”

That is Adam McBride, quoted by Luke Whyte in a SuperRare editorial. The square brackets are the original’s. MoonCats surfaced on 12 March 2021, which puts Curio Cards at roughly 13 March, and Etheria’s own priority tweet is timestamped 13 March 2021 at 19:54:47 UTC — so the dates line up and the whole re-dating of early Ethereum happened inside about seventy-two hours.

McBride had a word for what he was doing:

“My bio is NFT archeologist,” he said. “That is what I am. For me, it is treasure hunting; digging up these pieces of the past which walk us through the story to today.”

One date caveat, because this book keeps them. The SuperRare page now carries 15 April 2025, but it refers to the Christie’s set as something that “will go on auction… this October” and cites data “as of August 7th”, which places original publication around August or September 2021. The on-page date is a content-management artefact and is not used here.

What was actually found

The find itself was not a card. It was a set of addresses in a git history.

Amy Castor and David Gerard, writing in June 2022, give the clearest account:

“Curio Cards lay dormant until March 2021, when @DieAping on Twitter (whose account has since been deleted) uncovered the old Curio ‘vending machines’ on Github. These were early versions of the Curio smart contracts, still with active Curio Card contracts in them — though the links on the website to the smart contracts had been removed.”

Read that against chapter nine. Travis Uhrig had removed the vending-machine links from the website deliberately, because he did not want to sell people cards he believed were worthless. He could not switch the contracts off. What he could not do was scrub the old versions of his own site out of its repository. The addresses were sitting in the commit history of the page that had been edited to hide them.

A note on the handle. The documented spelling is @DieAping, and the account is deleted. The shows give it several other ways, so no spelling is printed here as settled.

Then the mechanics, from the best contemporaneous write-up — OrangutanCapital on Medium, bylined 15 March 2021, two days after the find:

“Since the official website was no longer vending any of the collectibles, more sophisticated users took it upon themselves to access the Curio Cards smart-contract manually, using the interface on Etherscan. Cards which had not previously sold-out were still available to be purchased, most of which still cost only 0.0025 ETH. Twitter user @HarryBTC created a tutorial for users wanting to purchase some of the remaining tokens.”

“In less than 24 hours, all remaining Curio Cards were sold and a new community and market was established…”

0.0025 ether. The 2017 price, chapter four’s quarter, still sitting there in a live vending machine in March 2021 — because nobody had been able to change it. Four years of ETH appreciation had not touched the sticker. The cards were, for a few hours, available at their original price to anyone who read a tutorial.

Two tweets anchor the sequence and this book will not quote either of them. Harry BTC’s tutorial is twitter.com/HarryBTC/status/1370969955349491713, dated 14 March 2021. McBride’s investigative thread is twitter.com/adamamcbride/status/1371226231140671489, dated 15 March 2021. Their existence and dates are documented by contemporaneous third-party citation. Their contents were never read, so nothing is said here about what they say — not summarised, not characterised. They are in the apparatus under what could not be established.

The decisive fact

Everything that followed — the market, the community, the auction houses, the book — rests on a single choice made by one person in the first hours, and Travis Uhrig identifies it precisely:

“A diaphing found them he figured it out bought a couple with just to figure out how it worked and then he told people about it. He told them how to do it he sent the guides and instructions and is like you know here’s the steps you follow”

He found them. He bought a couple to see how they worked. And then he told everybody.

Hunt understood the counterfactual and states it as the hinge of the whole story:

“And again, just looking at all the happy accidents that had to happen is that if the first guy who found it had just told no one and quietly bought them all, there’d be no market for these because one person would have them all”

That is correct and it is worth sitting with, because the economically rational move was available and obvious. A person who had just worked out that a forgotten 2017 art collection was purchasable at 2017 prices from contracts nobody was watching could have drained the lot for a few ether and said nothing. There would have been no community, no distribution, no floor, no set-collecting, and no Christie’s lot — because a complete collection in one wallet is an inventory, not a market.

Instead he published instructions and the supply was gone in a day, spread across many buyers. The thing that made Curio Cards valuable was a stranger declining to corner it.

It is also, incidentally, the inverse of what happened in 2017, when Robek found an accidentally-released card, bought the lot, and tried to flip it — and failed, as chapter six records, because the card was card 10 and nobody could look up a token on EtherDelta anyway. The same opportunity arose twice, four years apart. The second time, somebody did the generous thing, and that is the difference between the two halves of this book.

Archaeology, by that name

Uhrig’s account of what the finders did next is the best description anywhere of how this kind of research actually works:

“they found the other vending machines because there were 31 vending machines.”

“They found old tweets old you know they found the original Bitcoin talk forum post of where we explained how it worked and that was like that was the way you announced the project back in the day you on the Bitcoin talk forums.”

“If you were on the Bitcoin talk forums you weren’t a serious project.”¹

Then the detail that makes the archive worth having:

“And they went into the comments on that forum are rich by the way you can go back and read the skepticism when we announce the project and compare it with the current situation.”

The skepticism is still there, under the launch announcement, from May 2017, next to a project that would sell at Christie’s. Nobody has to take anyone’s word for how it was received at the time.

And his summary:

“so there was like some serious archaeological work and all the figure of this thing out and they did all this without any really really not knowing for sure if there were anything.”

Not knowing for sure if there were anything. The grammar has collapsed and the meaning has not. People spent days reconstructing a dead project from commit histories and forum posts with no guarantee that there was anything at the end of it.

Uhrig also insists on a distinction the retellings flatten:

“Yeah so this is the rediscovery it’s not like in there’s a rediscovery and then there was an art restoration initiative with the rediscovery happened first.”

Two phases: the rediscovery, then the restoration. Chapter twelve is the restoration, and it cost something.

Got any cards?

From the inside, the first sign was not an announcement. It was a direct message.

“I got a couple of strange Twitter messages where the guy was like, you got any cards? Got any cards.”

What makes this more than an anecdote is that Daniel Friedman, Max Infeld and Robek each independently describe receiving the same kind of message. Four people, separately, in four different recordings, remember strangers appearing in their inboxes in March 2021 asking whether they still had any Curio Cards. It is the best-corroborated single beat in the archive — the moment a dead project’s participants all simultaneously noticed something had changed, before any of them knew what.

Hunt’s emotional account of the following weeks is the most compressed thing he says anywhere:

“So we’ve got a bunch of fans that essentially what we were looking for in the old days. So a lot of this is like, where were you four years ago? But at the same time, I’m so happy to see you because the fans of Curio cards are making this all possible.”

Where were you four years ago? And in the same breath, gratitude. He does not resolve the contradiction and the book does not resolve it for him.

What the fans did, in his own list:

“They’re building the galleries, they’re building the leaderboards, they’re helping us fix things, they set up the discord, they built a wrapper.”

Note the order, and note that the wrapper is last. It is the only item on that list that caused permanent damage.

And the strangeness of it, which he never quite gets over:

“it’s the strangest thing to be in a project four years ago and to kind of fail at it to not have great success and then four years later everyone’s like we love what you did”

Still a long way from a million dollars

One more thing belongs in this chapter, because it is dated before Christie’s and it shows how uncertain the spring of 2021 still felt from the inside.

Hunt, during the Adventures in #NFTs series — four months before the auction:

“And there’s an interesting dynamic here where I think to get into the mainstream media, we need to sell for a million dollars. But to sell for a million dollars, we need to get into the mainstream media.”

A circular problem, stated plainly, by a man who would watch it resolve in October. And then, bleaker than anything a co-creator is expected to say:

“I’ve said to people before I think that if anything’s going to break these NFTs, it’s going to be curial cards. We don’t have any celebrities. We don’t have any money. We don’t have any backing. There’s nobody to make this market for us.”

“curial cards” is Curio Cards. There’s nobody to make this market for us. He was wrong, and the reason he was wrong is the subject of this chapter: the market was made by people he had never met, none of whom stood to gain from making it, starting with one who found a live contract and told the internet instead of emptying it.

What he was right about is that nobody with money or celebrity ever showed up to do it on purpose.