Fourteen

First

This chapter does not defend the claim.

That needs saying at the top, because every account of Curio Cards published so far either asserts priority or rebuts it, and this one does neither. The research does not support a confident claim. It supports a set of dated facts, a category argument that has to be made rather than assumed, and one unexamined gap that nobody on any side has addressed.

The licence for proceeding this way comes from Hunt. Asked about being first, in 2021:

“What matters is in the Ethereum blockchain, you can see our transactions. It’s completely provable now. It is the thing. So if there’s one earlier than Curio cards and it’s in the blockchain, I’m not going to fight it. I know what the truth is.”

If there’s one earlier and it’s in the blockchain, I’m not going to fight it. So this chapter went and looked at the blockchain, and there are earlier ones, and it does not fight.

What the founders actually said

Before the press and the auction house, the people who built it were careful — more careful than anyone who wrote about them.

Travis Uhrig, May 2021, hedging unprompted in the middle of making the claim:

“It’s suddenly historically interesting to a lot of Ethereum’s because it’s it looks to be the very first time anyone did an art NFT on Ethereum. I never felt comfortable saying that before the first because you know you never know”

It looks to be. I never felt comfortable. He repeats the hedge in 2022. He also describes the moment he first suspected it, and the suspicion arrives as somebody else’s claim rather than his own:

“the only reason why you can’t work for a long time is I went to a New York, there was rare a conference and crypto punks was there which I love crypto punks and the guy was talking is like, oh yeah, we’re the first art, you know crypto art on on Ethereum and I’m like, oh, that’s cool.”

The shape of it survives: he heard CryptoPunks claim to be first, thought oh, that’s cool, and only later worked out that his own project was earlier.¹ That is not how a man who has been nursing a priority claim behaves.

Hunt’s own firsts-claims are hedged in the same way, every time:

“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”

“then we do the Marisol Vengus cards and they’re really interesting because these might be the first fine art NFTs”

I don’t know the history. Maybe. Might be. The only unhedged version in the archive comes from an artist rather than a founder — Max Infeld, on the sixth-anniversary stream: “I if I’m not mistaken, I think we were the first NFT project.” Which is itself double-hedged.

The project’s own documentation is the most defensible version anyone has written, and it works by carving out:

“The few NFT collections that pre-date Curio Cards either covered a different category, such as digital land (example: Etheria World), or were located/started on a different network (example: RarePepe on Counterparty).”

Two exceptions — category and network. It is a real argument, honestly structured. Note what it does not mention. We will come back to that.

What is on the chain, in order

Here is the documented sequence. Every timestamp is a contract creation on Ethereum mainnet, in UTC.

One date trap worth flagging: Etheria v1.2 is 1 November 2015 in UTC. Secondary timelines routinely give 31 October 2015, which is the US-local rendering of 01:20 UTC.

“Six weeks before CryptoPunks” measures to the second launch

This is the most-repeated statistic about Curio Cards and it is doing quiet work.

• Curio card 1 → CryptoPunks V1 = 30 days, 7 hours. One month.
• Curio card 1 → CryptoPunks V2 = 44 days. Six weeks.

The “six weeks” figure — used by the project’s documentation, by nft now, by Castor and Gerard — measures to the 22 June relaunch and passes over the 9 June V1 deployment. Both numbers are defensible once you say which CryptoPunks you mean, and nobody saying “six weeks” says which.

Gerard and Castor caught the identical manoeuvre from the CryptoPunks side, in June 2022:

“Media articles detailing the history of Punks frequently state June 23, 2017, as the official launch date of the project — as if the initial botched launch never happened.”

They also note, generously, that the two projects faced the same problem:

“As CurioCards did before them, Hall and Watkinson had to write their own smart contract code to implement the Punks’ tokens, tweaking the existing ERC-20 standard used by ICO tokens.”

So one month, not six weeks, unless you specify. This book says one month.

PixelMap, which nobody has answered

PixelMap was deployed on Ethereum on 17 November 2016, nearly six months before Curio Cards. It is a 3,970-tile billboard whose tiles users buy and paint. The images are on chain.

No source on any side of this argument has ever reasoned through why PixelMap does not count. Not the press. Not Wikipedia. Not Christie’s. Not the project’s own documentation, whose two-part carve-out addresses virtual land and other networks and is silent on PixelMap. Etheria’s FAQ, which is hostile to Curio’s claim, lists PixelMap as a real entrant. It is the live gap in the entire debate and it has been sitting there since 2021.

There is a distinction available, and this book will state it as a distinction rather than smuggle it in as a fact: PixelMap is a user-supplied canvas, not a curated edition of works by named artists released as a show. Curio Cards had seven artists, a selection process, a weekly release schedule and a numbering sequence. PixelMap had tiles and whoever bought them. Those are different kinds of object.

But that is an argument about categories, and it has to be made out loud and defended, and it has not been. Anyone who repeats “first art NFT on Ethereum” without disposing of PixelMap is asserting something they have not established.

Etheria, and the move it shares with Curio

Etheria’s own FAQ makes the competing claim and makes it sharply:

“Etheria is the first true NFT project in history, deployed October 2015 — its deployment showed up on /r/ethereum as an unexplained gas spike before anyone knew what it was — and demoed at DEVCON 1 (Ethereum’s first developer conference) on November 13, 2015.”

“In the vintage NFT space, ‘first’ is a claim asserted by many different groups about many different assets, usually by twisting the term ‘NFT’ to suit a particular asset. … Etheria is the first project to unambiguously check all the boxes of what people consider an NFT today.”

The bold is Etheria’s. And the sentence is self-aware about exactly the problem this chapter has — that “first” is usually produced by bending the definition to fit whatever you own.

Which makes the next thing more interesting than any rebuttal. Etheria’s own 2015 copy is preserved on the same website and flagged there as being from 2015:

“The First Decentralized Virtual World & Crypto-Real Estate”

“Ξtheria is a virtual world in which players can own tiles, farm them for blocks, and build things.”

In 2015, Etheria claimed to be the first virtual world. Not the first NFT. The NFT framing was applied retrospectively, and Etheria’s priority tweet is dated 13 March 2021 — the same week as the Curio rediscovery.

That is the identical move Curio’s claim depends on. Nobody in 2015 or 2017 was competing to be first at a thing called an NFT, because the word did not exist in that sense until the standard of chapter ten — the standard that named Curio Cards as the counter-example. Every priority claim in this field, Curio’s included, is a 2021 category applied backwards to a 2015–2017 artefact. Both Etheria pages are live on the same site today, two floors of the same argument.

One thing in Etheria’s claim is not verified: the DEVCON1 demo. It rests entirely on Etheria’s own FAQ and secondary echoes; no Ethereum Foundation source, schedule or recording was found. It does real work in their argument, so it is flagged rather than accepted.

Larva Labs changed its own claim

And then the comparison that shows how unstable all of this is. Captures of larvalabs.com/cryptopunks:

• 1 June 2018 — no “first NFT” sentence exists on the page at all.
• 31 March 2021 — “The Cryptopunks are the first ‘Non-Fungible Token’ on Ethereum and inspiration for the ERC-721 standard that powers most digital art and collectibles.”
• 31 October 2021 — “Cryptopunks are one of the earliest examples of a ‘Non-Fungible Token’ on Ethereum, and were inspiration for the ERC-721 standard…”
• Live site, fetched 30 September 2026 — retains the softened wording.

Absent in 2018. Asserted by March 2021. Hedged by October 2021. The softening happened somewhere between 31 March and 31 October 2021 — a window containing both the Curio rediscovery and the Christie’s sale. The exact date could not be established, because an August capture attempt returned an HTTP 429, so the bracket is asserted and not a date.

Note also what survived the edit: “inspiration for the ERC-721 standard”. Chapter ten shows that CryptoPunks appears in ERC-721’s Rationale as an example of what an NFT is, and Curio Cards in Backwards Compatibility as an example of what an NFT is not. On that specific point CryptoPunks’ claim is better documented than Curio’s, and it is the one place in this comparison where the standard takes a side.

Off Ethereum entirely

Three more candidates compete not for “first on Ethereum” but for “first tokenised art”, and they cannot be reconciled with the Ethereum timeline because they are on other chains.

Quantum, by Kevin McCoy, on Namecoin. Guinness World Records, record 15-696336, gives “When: 05 May 2014”; most press says 3 May 2014. Unresolved, and both are reported. Guinness is internally sloppy in the same entry, calling Namecoin “a blockchain software modelled from Bitcoin’s code” and also saying Quantum was “created via Bitcoin.” Guinness also records the co-creator’s own disavowal of what followed:

“Dash has subsequently expressed dissatisfaction with the NFT phenomenon, pointing out how little this technology has changed from his and McCoy’s hastily constructed prototype.”

Rare Pepe, on Counterparty: RAREPEPE Series 1 Card 1, an edition of 300, issued 13 September 2016 in Bitcoin block 428919 — secondary consensus only, nothing verified on chain by this research. Rare Pepe is the project Curio Cards’ founders admired and differed from, and the project that shares Curio’s footnote in ERC-721.

Spells of Genesis, FDCARD: announced in a post bylined 27 April 2015.

So what can be said

Here is what the documented record supports. The following is this book’s own formulation, not a quotation from anyone — no source states it in these words:

Curio Cards was the first curated art NFT project on Ethereum — a show of numbered editions by named artists, released on a schedule — deployed 9 May 2017, one month before the first CryptoPunks contract and six weeks before the CryptoPunks relaunch. It was preceded on Ethereum by non-art tokens (Terra Nullius, August 2015), by virtual land (Etheria, October 2015), and by a user-painted on-chain canvas (PixelMap, November 2016).

Every clause in that is dated and checkable. It is also longer and less quotable than “the first art NFTs on Ethereum”, which is why nobody uses it.

And it is still a claim about categories. The chain records deployment order and nothing else. It cannot tell you whether Etheria’s tiles are art, whether PixelMap’s canvas is art, whether a text-claim contract is an NFT, or whether a project counts. Those are judgements, they were made in 2021, and they were applied backwards to objects whose makers were not competing for them.

The press, graded by how much hedge it used, shows the judgement being manufactured in real time:

And the chain of propagation is traceable: CoinDesk on 17 September, lifted near-verbatim by CNBC on 1 October, cited in turn by Wikipedia. One hedged sentence, hardening at each step.

Wikipedia itself holds three non-identical formulations, and the most technically accurate statement of the Curio claim published anywhere turns out to be unsourced editorial work by an anonymous contributor in the NFT article:

“Curio Cards in May of that year is credited with being Ethereum’s first art NFT project using the fungible standard…”

Using the fungible standard. That phrase appears in neither of the sources cited for it. It is also exactly right — it is the only published formulation that builds chapter ten’s footnote into the claim instead of around it.

The best structure in published journalism belongs to Castor and Gerard, who are the only writers to state the Etheria exception in the same breath as the Curio claim:

“In early 2021, most people considered CryptoPunks to be the first Ethereum-based art NFTs as we know them — but then Curio Cards was unearthed. Curio Cards was originally launched on May 9, 2017 — predating CryptoPunks by six weeks.”

“Etheria, which launched only a few months after Ethereum’s mainnet went live in 2015, predated Curio Cards. But Etheria was a virtual world, and its NFTs were for plots of virtual land — not art. Still, even Etheria land would resell for big money in 2021.”

Make the claim and name the exception in the same place. That is the honest form, and this chapter has tried to follow it — with the addition that there is a second exception nobody names, and it is called PixelMap.

The man whose project this is said he would not fight an earlier one if it were on the blockchain. There are three earlier ones on the blockchain. Two of them are arguably not art and one of them arguably is, and that one has never been argued about.

He also said, in the same breath, I know what the truth is. On the evidence, the truth is narrower than the press made it and more interesting than a superlative: a small failed project put a curated art show on a public ledger a month before anyone else did anything comparable, was named in the founding standard as the thing that standard was not, and survived because of it.