Twelve

When You’re Older Than the Thing

Travis Uhrig explains the entire technical predicament of 2021 in eight words:

“When you’re older than the thing you’re not the thing.”

Curio Cards predated ERC-721. That is the project’s whole claim to significance and it is also, in March 2021, the reason the cards did not work. OpenSea — where the newly interested were going to look — understood ERC-721 and ERC-1155 tokens. It did not understand thirty-one separate ERC-20 contracts with zero decimals, because nothing did, because in 2017 there had been nothing to be compatible with. Chapter ten has the footnote in ERC-721 that says so in as many words.

So the cards had to be put inside something modern. Uhrig:

“But all it does is it takes your native you know modified ERC 20 curio card and it inserts it into a modern standard NFT.”

The project’s documentation reaches for a collector’s metaphor, which is apt:

“You can think of it like a collector’s sleeve, which old Curio Cards are placed inside of, so they can be accessed on NFT platforms like OpenSea (using the new ERC-1155 token format).”

A sleeve. You send your 2017 token into a wrapper contract and it issues you a 2021 token that stands for it, and the platforms can read the new one. The original stays in the wrapper. To get it back out, you unwrap.

Unless you cannot.

The rushed one

Within hours of the rediscovery, before any audit, somebody in the Discord built a wrapper. The best record of what happened next was written days afterwards by OrangutanCapital, on 15 March 2021, and it opens with a warning in bold at the top of the page:

“Disclaimer: Do NOT use the wrapping contract currently posted in the Discord server — you will lose your Curio Cards!“

The body:

“Within the first 24 hours or so of the project’s rediscovery, a wrapping contract was spun-up by community members to enable Curio Card token holders to prepare their tokens for exchange within the Opensea NFT marketplace. Unfortunately, a bug was discovered in contract just hours after it was published and shared (along with some usage warnings, nevertheless) within the Curio Card Discord server before it had been audited. This bug prevented wrapped Curio Cards from being unwrappable, leaving the original tokens stranded in the contract. Although the wrapped versions of the cards are still tradable, the owners of these wrapped Curio Cards will never be able to redeem their original tokens. About 5% of the Curio Card supply was sent to the contract before the discovery of the bug, essentially burning a further portion of the circulating supply of many cards.”

Roughly five per cent of the entire collection went into a one-way box in the first days of the project’s revival. The wrapped tokens still trade; the originals inside them are unreachable forever. The author of that piece lost cards himself and says so in the same article: “…and lost one of two rarer cards that I purchased peer-to-peer in the faulty wrapper contract (my ape tendencies to blame).”

Castor and Gerard use the community’s own word for the result:

“The first rushed third-party wrapper created to get Curio Cards to work on OpenSea had a fatal bug: when anxious Curio Card holders sent their tokens to the contract, the tokens became forever stuck — ‘permawrapped.’”

And the project’s documentation now carries the episode as a standing warning:

“For an example of a 3rd-party wrapper gone bad, in 2021, someone made a buggy wrapper that prevents cards from unwrapping, locking those cards forever. There is no way to disable this locking wrapper.”

There is no way to disable this locking wrapper. The same immutability that preserved card 17b for four years, and that kept the vending machines selling at 2017 prices, also guarantees that a bug written in a hurry in March 2021 will keep those cards sealed for as long as Ethereum runs. The property is not good or bad. It does not distinguish.

The official wrapper, audited, came afterwards: an ERC-1155 contract at 0x73DA73EF3a6982109c4d5BDb0dB9dd3E3783f313, with a 17b-specific wrapper at 0x04AfA589E2b933f9463C5639f412b183Ec062505 added in 2022 and a community alternate at 0x3c2754c0cdc5499df1a50d608d8985070bf87b30. Who wrote the official wrapper, and who audited it, is not established. The documentation says only that it was “a joint effort by the community and members of the original Curio team” and that it was “reviewed by an external solidity auditor”. The project’s own team page names Moon as “2021 official curio wrapper solidity developer” and Kian Bradley as “2021 wrapper site and website developer” — both routinely omitted from press accounts — but does not say that Moon wrote this particular contract. The apparatus lists it as an open question rather than guessing.

What it cost, and how many numbers that takes

Here the chapter has to be careful, because this is the single most muddled set of figures in the entire Curio Cards story, and the muddle is not anyone’s fault — it is four different quantities that all look like the same quantity.

Start from chapter five’s arithmetic. A complete set needs one of every card. The maximum number of complete sets that can exist is the supply of the scarcest card. In 2017 that was card 26, Education, at 111.

The best-sourced figure for what the faulty wrapper took is five. Travis Uhrig, on the record to CoinDesk on 17 September 2021:

“There are only 111 of them. Five have been lost,” Curio Cards co-founder Travis Uhrig told CoinDesk. That puts the number of feasible full sets at 106

OrangutanCapital’s independent contemporaneous count in March 2021 also arrives at five. Castor and Gerard, in June 2022, imply six and show no working, which yields 105. No source anywhere supports the figure of three, which appears only in the shows.

So four numbers circulate for the maximum number of complete sets, and the honest position is that all four are defensible and none are interchangeable:

The founders themselves do not converge. Daniel Friedman, on the sixth-anniversary stream:

“There can now only be 111 complete sets of Cureo cards for the collectors out there.”

Uhrig, in the same episode:

“And of that one, the 116 were actually lost, provably lost. So there can only be 105 full sets in existence.”

That arrives at 105 full sets, which implies six lost from 111.¹ And a year later, on the seventh anniversary:

“So in theory, there may not even be possible to have more than 35 full sets ever.”

One founder, three numbers, across three recordings: 105, then 35, and elsewhere 106 in print. This book uses 106 where a figure is needed, because it is the only one attached to a named source giving a stated basis on the record, and it says so each time.

To settle it properly takes one call. Read balanceOf for the faulty wrapper on card 26’s contract at 0x1cB5BF4Be53eb141B56f7E4Bb36345a353B5488c, or take the Card_Supply_Verbose.csv published at ccsupply.xyz, which treats the broken wrapper as a burn address. Nobody appears to have done it and published the result.

The number that inverts the story

And then, in 2024, the received version stopped being true.

nft now, 11 March 2024 — and note the outlet discloses that its author holds twelve Curio Cards:

“Despite boasting the highest floors, ‘Complexity’ and ‘Passion’ are not technically the rarest Curio Cards in terms of original supply size (222 total tokens each). That distinction belongs to the third card in the series, ‘Education’ (111 total tokens). However, while ‘Education’ currently has 104 of those tokens in active supply, ‘Complexity’ and ‘Passion’ both only have 33 active — the lowest across the collection.”

“Most importantly, these cards’ rarity essentially set the current cap on possible complete sets at 33.“

Card 26 is no longer the bottleneck. Cards 24 and 25 are — Complexity and Passion, the 333 and the 222, which nobody ever thought of as the scarce ones. Thirty-three complete sets, not a hundred and six.

One flag on that passage: it gives 222 for both cards 24 and 25, which conflicts with the 333 / 222 / 111 sequence that the chain, the project’s documentation and Christie’s all agree on. The quoted text stands as published and the discrepancy is recorded in the apparatus.

What happened is not another disaster. It is the slow attrition the project’s own documentation describes, and the terminology matters:

“The website shows the total supply of Cards created and released, while OpenSea can only see the supply of Cards that are wrapped. Cards that have never been wrapped could potentially be lost, or held in old wallets that are no longer accessible. We call these zombie wallets… You can think of the amount listed on the website as the ‘maximum potential supply,’ and the supply on OpenSea as the ‘active supply‘… the real supply is potentially somewhere between the two.”

Zombie wallets. Cards bought for a quarter in 2017 by people who have lost the keys, or lost interest, or died, or who do not know what they have. Those cards are not destroyed and not available. They are in the gap between maximum potential supply and active supply, and that gap is why the 2024 number is a third of the 2021 number.

Which means the cap on complete sets is not a fact about Curio Cards. It is a fact about how much of 2017 is still reachable, and it falls over time.

The price of putting it in a sleeve

This chapter is about preservation costing something, so the cost should be stated without hedging and so should the benefit.

The cost: roughly five per cent of the collection permanently sealed, five copies of the card that then governed set-completion gone, and a reduction in the maximum number of complete Curio Cards sets that can ever exist — from 111 to 106 — caused not by 2017’s carelessness but by 2021’s enthusiasm. The damage was done by people trying to save the thing, in the first forty-eight hours, out of exactly the eagerness the project had spent four years failing to attract.

The benefit, in the project’s own accounting a year later:

“Today, the wrapper has helped process around $120 million in trades on OpenSea alone, ranking Curio Cards as the 32nd most popular NFT project of all time by trade volume.”

Those are the project’s figures, not independently checked here, and they are reported as the project’s claim. The holder count in the same post rises “well above 4000 unique card-owners” and then “over 4800.”

Set that against chapter six. In July 2017, after the only drop that ever sold out, Robek counted the holders of his three cards: “only about eight people hold all of them total combined.” Eight. Four and a half years later, four thousand eight hundred.

The sleeve worked. It also ate five per cent of the thing it was protecting, and the cards it ate are still visible on chain, wrapped, tradeable, and permanently unopenable — which is as good a monument as this story is going to get to the difference between caring about something and knowing what you are doing.