The Curio Cards Quote Bank

Every quote the book draws on, with exact words, date, source and a retrievable reference.

Compiled 1 October 2026. Standalone artefact — usable without the book.

How to read this

Quotes fall into four classes, marked throughout:

The transcript problem, stated plainly

Most of the spoken material comes from Whisper transcripts of World Crypto Network, Mad Bitcoins and The Bitcoin Group shows. These have no speaker labels and contain real transcription errors. Three consequences, and the book abides by all three:

1. Nothing is silently corrected. Quotes appear exactly as the transcript has them. Suspected errors are flagged beside the quote, never fixed inside it.
2. Speaker attribution is inferred, and the inference is shown. Every spoken quote carries a confidence level. Where it cannot be determined, it says so.
3. The transcript is not the audio. Every quote carries its episode ID so the original can be checked. For anything load-bearing, check the audio.

Recurring substitutions found across the corpus, for anyone grepping:

Curio → Kerio, Kirio, Kirao, Cureo, Curial, Cheerio, karaoke, curious cards, my career cards, criteria, KiraOcarts, Gerio, O’Reo, trio, Syria · Rhett Creighton → ret, red, rent, rat, rats, reds, “I know right”, Rhett Craton · Robek → rowback, RobEx, road back, Robeck · cryptograffiti → Crypto Graffiti, CryptoGraphete, Cryptography, Christopher Feedy, CryptoDurkey · Phneep → Fennep, Feneep, Phineep, Fnip, phoniebs, “a finit” · ether/Ethereum → “a theorem”, “the therium” · .com → calm · EtherDelta → either delta, ether dealt · MyEtherWallet → my ether wallet · MetaMask → MetaMass, met a mask · vending machine → Venom machine, venting machine, venue machine · Dyaping → die-aping, died vaping, dyaphing · Thoros of Myr → Thoros of Mirror · Marisol Vengas → Vengus, Vingus, Vegas, Vinguez · GDAX → “G X”, gtax · BIP 91 → Bit91 · ERC-721 → ERC 31, ERC 31 20 · DG717 → “DG-Zidil and Seven” · Taylor Gerring → Taylor Garing · Sotheby’s → “souther bees” · wrapper → rapper · Cyprus → Cypress · Etheria → “a theory” · Andreas Antonopoulos → Andrea Santanopoulos · Beeple → people

Verification

Every transcript quote in this bank was checked by exact substring match against its source file (text.count(quote) == 1) before being recorded. Quotes that failed were discarded, not repaired. Where a passage spans a speaker change, that is stated.

Where the files are

• Episode transcripts: ~/brain/_research/curio_book/episodes/ (31 files, each with a header giving title, date, show code, episode ID, brain item ID and original transcript path)
• Full extraction from brain.db: ~/brain/_research/curio_book/all_full.jsonl (5,000 items mentioning “curio card”)
• Full research reports: ~/Sites/1n2.org/curio-book/apparatus/research_*.md and mine_*.md

PART 1 — THE CONTEMPORANEOUS RECORD, 2017–2018

The most valuable material in the archive, because it was not recalled.

1.1 Launch day, 9 May 2017

[DOC] Curio Cards token factory 0x37AAb22019448859fc255e6E353A1baF2c05E6Bb, creation transaction 0xf4cfe0b9cc846fdf204415c20a10a84622e0fc4b51a55c28d426b6b800c7892a, block 3678409, 9 May 2017 17:18:04 UTC, from address 0x3CC44273a97E8fbFbCBd3d60200CC9Fd33d84d66 at nonce 0 — the wallet’s first transaction.

[DOC] Curio Card 1, Apples. Contract 0x6Aa2044C7A0f9e2758EdAE97247B03a0D7e73d6c, creation transaction 0x6facba5a58dc0541c7e97d9271640b1a7b4bdaced26fd80ffa8edfea6745e42d, block 3678426, 9 May 2017 17:22:51 UTC. Decoded constructor call:

CreateCard(100000, "Curio1", "CRO1", "CurioCard1", "QmZGrL7HrUmkLuUxp7NV4n1H8tHkurmBAdsx8jzJp4v1tn")

Four minutes forty-seven seconds after the factory. The IPFS hash is in the call data.

Independently re-verified 1 October 2026 against the Blockscout API, not taken on trust from the research pass. timestamp returns exactly 2017-05-09T17:22:51.000000Z; block_number 3678426; decoded_input.method_call is CreateCard(uint256 arg0, string arg1, string arg2, string arg3, string arg4) with the five parameters above; from is 0x3CC44273a97E8fbFbCBd3d60200CC9Fd33d84d66 at nonce 1 (nonce 0 being the factory deployment four minutes earlier); to is the factory. The contract is named CardToken, token Curio1/CRO1, decimals “0”, total_supply “100000”, type ERC-20, and today has 21 holders.

Two further details from the same record, both usable and neither previously noted: gas_used 1,093,035 at a gas_price of 39 gwei, for a total fee of 0.042628365 ETH. With ether around ninety dollars that afternoon, deploying the first Curio Card cost roughly four dollars — about sixteen times the price of the card it created.

[DOC] Bitcointalk announcement thread, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1909450.0, author MyCurioCards, first post 9 May 2017, 07:12:01 PM forum time. Title verbatim:

[ANN] Curio Cards: Welcome to the future of collectibles

Opening, verbatim:

“Welcome to the future of collectibles“

“When the grand experiment that is ethereum began, Vitalik Buterin created a modular, stateful, Turing-complete contract scripting system married to a blockchain.”

and:

“Yet the past two years have painfully demonstrated a missing feature: digital trading cards.”

Technical spec as posted: “Type: ERC20-compliant token / Supply: 100,000 Limited / Divisibility: 0 decimal places”. Three vending tiers per card at 0.0025 / 0.0050 / 0.01 ETH. Contact mycuriocards@gmail.com. “Plaidpaper: Coming soon!”

Caveat for citation. The post as displayed today is the 16 May edit. The un-edited 9 May text survives quoted inside the thread at post #13 by user RAGEmond (...msg18946986, 9 May 2017, 09:13:59 PM) — that quote block is the best source for launch-day wording. Wayback has only post-edit captures.

[DOC] Same thread, post #14, 9 May 2017, 10:06:05 PM, verbatim:

“Early Bird Round #1 for all #CurioCards have SOLD OUT”

[DOC] Reddit, r/MyCurioCards, title verbatim “Curio Cards - the future of digital collectibles”, author MyCurioCards, created 2017-05-09T19:52:24.180000+0000. Score 1, zero comments.

[TH-THEN] @MadBitcoins, 9 May 2017 19:57 UTC, tweet ID 862033812653457408:

“Curio Cards - the future of collectibles https://youtu.be/f8In7X2S0uw available now at http://mycuriocards.com”

[TH-THEN] Facebook, 9 May 2017 20:30:

“Check out my new digital trading cards at https://mycuriocards.com/”

[TH-THEN] Facebook, 9 May 2017 23:12:

“Check out my new Digital Collectibles company at http://MyCurioCards.com”

Note. The three timestamps corroborate within a forty-minute window: contract 17:22 UTC, Bitcointalk ~19:12 forum time, Reddit 19:52 UTC, tweet 19:57 UTC, sold-out notice 22:05 UTC. No 2017 page states the launch date. The 9 May date rests on the chain, the forum, Reddit, and a robots.txt capture of mycuriocards.com dated 20170510212923.

1.2 The first public explanation — The Bitcoin Group #145, 9 June 2017

Source: episodes/2017-06-09_TBG145.txt · Host self-identifies: “And I’m Thomas Hunt from the World Crypto Network.”

[TH-THEN] Speaker: Thomas Hunt (story-of-the-week segment, host goes last). Confidence high.

“My story of the week is a side project I’ve been working on. You can check it out at mycuriocards.com. These are digital trading cards on the Ethereum blockchain. This week’s cards are Crypto Graffiti cards and all proceeds from the sales of these cards go directly to the artist.”

ASR: “Crypto Graffiti” = cryptograffiti. The founding pitch in three sentences.

[TH-THEN] Same episode:

“So if you’d like to support CryptoGraphete and you have a little bit of Ethereum, you can send it to the vending machine here And it’ll send you back a card automatically to your address if you use my ether wallet You need to use a software you hold your own private keys to make sure you can get these tokens”

ASR: “CryptoGraphete” = cryptograffiti; “my ether wallet” = MyEtherWallet.

[TH-THEN] Same episode — the candid measure of the launch:

“And I haven’t been promoting it much But I just wanted to mention these are CryptoGraphete cards and all the proceeds go to the artist So thank you for supporting artists with KiraOcarts.”

ASR: “KiraOcarts” = Curio Cards — the worst mangling in the corpus.

1.3 Bitcoin.com, 4 June 2017 — the earliest substantial press

Jamie Redman, “Blockchain Collectibles: A Discussion With the Creator of Curio Cards”, https://news.bitcoin.com/blockchain-collectibles-curio-cards/, 4 June 2017. Photo caption verbatim: “Curio Cards founder and CEO, Thomas Hunt aka ‘Mad Bitcoins.’” Uhrig and Creighton are not mentioned in the article.

[TH-THEN] Direct quotes as published:

“I’ve always been a collector. I collected baseball cards, books, movies and now of course cryptocurrency. People love to collect things, so I thought, why not combine my love for cryptocurrency with my love for collecting and make something fun.”

“First we store the image of the Curio Card in IPFS, allowing the images to be hosted on their network. Then we store a link to the image in an ERC20 token on Ethereum.”

“In the past three weeks we’ve released four sets, a total of ten cards. Tuesday is new card day, so we always print new cards on Tuesday. These early cards were more of a test phase. In one week we will start releasing Artist Cards.”

“I believe blockchain-based collectibles will be very big in the future.”

1.4 The Robek interview — 20 July 2017

Source: episodes/2017-07-21_MB_Robek_CurioCardArtist.txt · Mad Bitcoins, episode MB_20170721_WGUBtwIEk_c · Video: https://youtu.be/WGUBtwIEk_c

Date note. File header says 2017-07-21; the transcript opens “Today is Thursday, July 20th, 2017”. 20 July 2017 was a Thursday. Recorded the 20th, published the 21st.

Two voices only: Thomas Hunt (host) and Robek (guest, artist). This is the single most valuable primary source in the archive — a contemporaneous interview with a Curio Card artist, two days after his set sold out.

[TH-THEN] Thomas Hunt, intro. Confidence high.

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

ASR: “rowback” = Robek; “his my Curio cards” = his MyCurioCards.

[OTHER] Robek. Confidence high (first words after “Rowback. How’s it going?”).

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

[TH-THEN] Thomas Hunt, screen-sharing the cards. Confidence high.

“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.”

ASR: “cars” = cards; “my buddy red” = Rhett. Dates the Robek launch to Tuesday 18 July 2017 and confirms cards 21–23 caricature the three founders.

[OTHER] Robek, on discovering the sell-out. Confidence high.

“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.”

[OTHER] Robek:

“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.”

[TH-THEN] Thomas Hunt, on the whale. Confidence high (“we looked at the Ethereum logs”).

“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.”

[OTHER] Robek, on the entire holder base. Confidence medium-high.

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

[OTHER] Robek, on the animated rare card. Confidence high.

“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.”

ASR: “the CURE team” = the Curio team.

[OTHER] Robek:

“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.”

[TH-THEN] Thomas Hunt, on IPFS. Confidence medium-high.

“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.”

[TH-THEN] / [OTHER] — speaker genuinely unclear, confidence medium:

“And so the IPFS hash is probably not as insane, but Rhett’s probably the one who could speak to that. It’s definitely up to Rhett for the technical, difficult details on this.”

Note: “Rhett” spelled correctly here, unlike elsewhere in the same file.

[TH-THEN] Thomas Hunt, explaining the token mechanism to a lay audience. Confidence medium.

“What’s unique about the cards is they’re actually ERC 20 tokens on the Ethereum network. So each one is like a token. It’s unique. It has it’s probably it has its own serial number.”

“And then they’re I don’t know if they’re signed, but they all link to the IPFS image that has their card. And then that can be displayed in the Curio card gallery.”

[TH-THEN] Thomas Hunt, on edition finality. Confidence medium-high.

“They are and if we did a second printing or whatever they would have to come from a new contract that old contract is settled is done. So that’s the idea behind this is to mimic the rarity of a baseball card where it has a series.”

[TH-THEN] Thomas Hunt, the two domains. Confidence high.

“And we’ve got more information on this at mycurio cards calm and we’ve got a step by step explanation on how to buy Curio cards at buy Curio cards calm.”

ASR: “calm” = .com, twice.

[TH-THEN] Thomas Hunt, on the wallet. Confidence high.

“So if you just scroll down what we have is we have this thing called Curio wallet which is a clone of my ether wallet so it’s a light wallet it doesn’t hold your private keys you just use it to create an account.”

[TH-THEN] Thomas Hunt, the vending machine — the clearest contemporaneous description. Confidence high.

“then you send a theorem from your Curio wallet to the vending machine and the vending machine bounces the card back to your wallet then you can use your public address to check in the gallery to see that you have gotten the card.”

ASR: “a theorem” = ether.

[TH-THEN] Thomas Hunt, the secondary market. Confidence high.

“then you have the card you can send it around you can trade it on ether delta is kind of like a stock market for these cards you can say I want to sell 10 cards at this price and you can sell them or or try to sell them”

[OTHER] Robek, how he got in. Confidence high.

“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”

ASR: “me and Austin” = me in 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.”

[OTHER] Robek, on an accidental early release of card 10 and his attempt to corner it. Confidence high.

“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.”

ASR: “either delta” = EtherDelta. Sentence trails off.

[TH-THEN] Thomas Hunt, reply. Confidence high.

“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.”

[TH-THEN] Thomas Hunt, defending Ethereum to a Bitcoin audience. Confidence high.

“Well it’s interesting I always said I didn’t really know if people should buy a theorem unless they were going to use it and then people are making fun of me in the chat and they’re laughing now because yes with my Kerio cards you actually use a theorem but we use this to do something that Bitcoin can’t do at the moment with a smart contracts that do the vending machines and we use this to provide people with you know playing trading cards on the internet that they can use for fun and to promote artwork.”

[OTHER] Robek, on gas costs. Confidence high.

“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”

[OTHER] Robek, on onboarding friction. Confidence high.

“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”

ASR: “my career cards” = MyCurioCards; later in the same passage “just go to G X grandma” and “transfer to gtax” = GDAX.

[TH-THEN] Thomas Hunt, on possibly leaving Ethereum. Confidence high.

“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”

[TH-THEN] Thomas Hunt, on congestion costing sales. Confidence high.

“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”

Flag. “we didn’t have a week” is almost certainly “we did have a week” — the rest of the sentence contradicts the negation. Reported, not fixed.

[TH-THEN] Thomas Hunt — the most citable price datum in the archive. Confidence medium-high.

“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.”

[OTHER] Robek, on gas versus card price. Confidence medium.

“Yeah but the gas limit for the gas limit is like 57k for the for the Vending machine for some reason or 57k is why which is like half of the cost of or like a fourth of the cost of the card.”

[TH-THEN] Thomas Hunt — the line the book is named after, or nearly. Confidence high.

“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.”

[OTHER] / [TH-THEN] — spans a speaker change (Robek then Hunt). Confidence medium-high.

“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. Oh is that the truth because I know right we had ret send the Ethereum to RobEx would count and the artist has been paid the money.”

ASR: “I know right” = I know Rhett; “ret” = Rhett; “RobEx would count” = Robek’s World account. Confirms proceeds reached the artist and that Rhett executed the transfer.

[TH-THEN] Thomas Hunt. Confidence high.

“It would look really bad if we didn’t pay and we tried to have you on the live stream anyway.”

[OTHER] Robek, on why he made the promo video. Confidence high.

“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.”

“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”

[OTHER] Robek, on not labelling the caricatures. Confidence high.

“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”

ASR: “I know right” = I know Rhett.

[OTHER] Robek, on intent. Confidence high.

“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”

[TH-THEN] Thomas Hunt — a co-creator predicting his own project’s failure. Confidence high.

“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”

[OTHER] Robek, on Travis and a shared card universe. Confidence high.

“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”

[OTHER] Robek, on his own approach. Confidence high.

“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.”

1.5 Public obscurity, measured live — 30 August 2017

Source: episodes/2017-08-30_WCN_LegalPanel.txt · Bitcoin Legal Panel — The SEC and You, at DG717, San Francisco.

[OTHER] Justin Holl, DG717 Community Manager (self-identifies in the next sentence). Confidence high.

“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” implies almost no hands went up — a live measure of obscurity four months after launch.

[OTHER] Travis Uhrig, the elevator pitch. Confidence medium-high (he is the MC; Justin has just said “two of your hosts”; the MC later introduces Hunt separately).

“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.”

ASR: “your curious system” garbled. Dates a website relaunch to 30 August 2017.

[OTHER] Travis Uhrig, continuing — the origin claim. Confidence medium-high.

“And we’re really excited about creating these very useful and helpful for the art community. We did a Bitcoin art show last year, and it’s kind of borne out of what we learned from that.”

Traces Curio Cards to a 2016 Bitcoin art show, stated in 2017.

[OTHER] Justin Holl, at the Ted Livingston event, 28 June 2017 (episodes/2017-06-28_WCN_TedLivingston.txt). Confidence medium-high.

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

[OTHER] Justin Holl, on Travis and the venue. Confidence medium-high.

“We were Travis’s second choice venue. He had booked another large rec<|tr|> capacity venue and they canceled at the last minute and Travis said, DG-Zidil and Seven I need some of your magic.”

ASR: <|tr|> is a stray Whisper token artefact; “DG-Zidil and Seven” = DG717.

1.6 Contemporaneous tweets, 2017 — recovered with exact timestamps

All dates derived from Twitter snowflake IDs, so each is independently verifiable. Source: brain.db, twitter_archive.

[TH-THEN] 9 May 2017 19:48 UTC (862031610706665473), retweet:

“RT @MyCurioCards: Hi there, I’m Curio! And I’m excited to bring you Curio Cards: the future of digital collectibles.”

[TH-THEN] 9 May 2017 22:05 UTC (862066058030489600):

“RT @MyCurioCards: Early Bird Round #1 for all #CurioCards have SOLD OUT more early cards are still available, but you better hurry”

[TH-THEN] 16 May 2017 19:59 UTC (864570928868376576):

“RT @MyCurioCards: What happened to #CurioCards 1-3? They’re now #outofprint Start your collection now”

[TH-THEN] 17 May 2017 20:35 UTC (864942492013043712):

“RT @MyCurioCards: Last week we sold more than 5,000 #CurioCards! and now they’re OOP! Get Cards 4-5-6 now at http://mycuriocards.com”

[TH-THEN] 25 May 2017 16:21 UTC (867777562516135936), reply to @PolitrickinCom:

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

[TH-THEN] 25 May 2017 16:32 UTC (867780411534884864):

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

[TH-THEN] 30 May 2017 19:55 UTC (869643331201925120):

“RT @MyCurioCards: ARTISTS WANTED! Sign up today to Create your own #CurioCards http://bit.ly/CurioArtistsWanted - all proceeds to the artists!”

[TH-THEN] 6 June 2017 19:00 UTC (872166352374476801):

“Going #LIVE with @travisformayor & @cryptograffiti to talk about the new #CurioCards http://youtu.be/gehWfbJxDrk #ETHEREUM #collectible”

[OTHER] cryptograffiti, retweeted by Hunt 6 June 2017 21:34 UTC (872205153729789952):

“RT @cryptograffiti: Honored to be chosen as 1st #CurioCards artist! Verifiably limited-edition trading cards avail at”

[TH-THEN] 20 June 2017 16:42 UTC (877205133574025216) — the day card 17 and 17b were both deployed:

“Taking the train back to the city to launch New #curiocards! @MyCurioCards”

[TH-THEN] 30 May 2017 17:18 UTC (869603885173710849) — added 1 October 2026; quoted in chapter 4 but previously missing from this bank:

“RT @MyCurioCards: IN JUST TWO HOURS! We’ve got new #CurioCards! Join us #LIVE at 12:00 PM PDT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6J6r5XAgRU #ethereum trading ca…”

[TH-THEN] 4 July 2017 18:08 UTC (882300047110529024) — added 1 October 2026:

“RT @MyCurioCards: Making coffee.... getting ready for NEW #CurioCards Tuesday! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFC8PCw-P9c #bitcoin #ethereum #cards https://t…”

[TH-THEN] 11 July 2017 17:05 UTC (884821013460000773) — added 1 October 2026:

“RT @MyCurioCards: Will there be new #CurioCards this Tuesday? Find out in two hours at 12:00 PM PDT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhnvB2YDjKo h/t @robek_wor…”

All three are retweets of the project account and are truncated in the Twitter archive with a trailing ellipsis. Chapters quoting them must either carry the RT @MyCurioCards: prefix or make clear the words are the project account’s, not Hunt’s own composition. The trailing … is the archive’s truncation, not an elision by this book.

[TH-THEN] 19 July 2017 17:00 UTC (887718849935691776):

“RT @MyCurioCards: .@robek_world Cards — SOLD OUT! – CURIO 21, 22, 23 – NOW SOLD OUT! GONE!”

[TH-THEN] 21 July 2017 01:51 UTC (888214746008133632):

“The Internet tried to break. But I wouldn’t let it. #LIVE with @robek_world creator of SOLD OUT @MyCurioCards https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGUBtwIEk_c”

[TH-THEN] 1 August 2017 23:37 UTC (892529777021566976) — card 26, which became the rarest and the bottleneck:

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

[TH-THEN] 26 September 2017 09:45 UTC (912613993080147968) — four words, to almost no one:

“Collecting is intensely human. @MyCurioCards”

And then the archive goes quiet

Own-account Curio posts by year, from brain.db: 2017 — dozens. 2018 — four. 2019 — none. 2020 — none. The silence is itself a documented finding.

[TH-THEN] 28 February 2018 15:52 UTC (968876656642334720):

“RT @MyCurioCards: The first Dapp submitted by a raccoon. https://www.stateofthedapps.com/dapps/curio-cards”

[OTHER] Travis Uhrig, retweeted by Hunt 19 April 2018 21:50 UTC (987086040409128960) — corroborates Hunt’s much later memory of a community vote:

“RT @travisformayor: Shameless plug / exciting update: We just launched the first round of community voting on new curio cards today! 21 ne…”

[TH-THEN] 25 July 2018 21:03 UTC (1022225742371803136):

“this is my thesis! Curio Cards FTW!”

1.7 The retrospect from inside the quiet — January and July 2018

Source: episodes/2018-01-19_WCN_BTS46.txt, 2018-01-27_WCN_BTS48.txt, 2018-07-24_WCN_BTS.txt. Host self-identifies: “My name is Thomas Hunt”. All [TH-THEN], confidence high.

19 January 2018, prompted by a caller about CryptoKitties:

“I know when we did a similar project called Curio cards that’s still being worked on, we were using my ether wallet and you were able to add custom tokens to the wallet. the wallet and then later we so one did a fork of my ether wallet that automatically had our custom tokens.”

“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. And I’ve always been a baseball card collector and then a book collector and then video game collector and whatever else and movies and things.”

Note the tense: “we tried” against “they’re still working on it”. By January 2018 he speaks of himself as departed.

“But what’s so great about Curio cards or crypto kitties is that they can prove that they’re cryptographically rare. And they can say we printed one of these cards or we printed a hundred of these cards. And that’s all they’re ever going to be.”

“But when you look at something like a crypto kitty or a curio card, it’s a lot like a beanie baby. You believe that the beanie baby have value, so you pay a lot of money for it on eBay. The company prints a certain number.”

26 January 2018 — the rueful near-miss:

“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.”

24 July 2018 — the priority claim, and the handover:

“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. They’re kind of like baseball cards. They’re kind of like crypto kitties, but of course we were before crypto kitties.”

24 July 2018 — the ERC-721 claim, as he understood it:

“It’s super funny because in the ERC 31 spec, it actually mentions CurioCards. There’s some certain flags or something that you can do because they saw the way that Rhett wrote our Curio cards and they liked what he did and they made it easier for you to run collectible type applications on the ERC 31 tokens and they mentioned our little project Curio cards.”

ASR: “ERC 31” = ERC-721 throughout. The underlying claim is substantially wrong — see Part 4.2.**

24 July 2018 — the title of the book:

“So it’s pretty cool where we’re a little footnote in the code of Ethereum forever now. Pretty cool for a little startup type project.”

[OTHER] The caller’s reply, immediately after. Confidence medium-high.

“Well ERC 31 20 doesn’t matter. Anything running on Ethereum is going to be in trouble in the next three years probably.”

The perfect illustration of contemporary indifference: a co-founder’s proudest technical footnote met with “doesn’t matter.”

PART 2 — THE ORIGIN STORY, IN RECOLLECTION

Mostly from Adventures in #NFTs, World Crypto Network, May–June 2021. Six interviews. Note: in episode #4 Thomas Hunt is the guest and Adam McBride is the interviewer — established by Hunt’s closing “it’s a great conversation Adam and I’d love to do it again sometime”.

2.1 Where the idea came from

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, episodes/2021-06-03_WCN_ThomasHunt_AiN4.txt, 3 June 2021. Confidence high throughout this section.

“It was 2016, 2017, and I’d always been a collector.”

His own dating is a two-year smear. Useful as an honest opening.

On the intellectual seed, crediting Andreas Antonopoulos on an early WCN show:

“He said that at some point there is going to be Joey coin. And the kids on the yard will have Joey coin and they’ll have Freddie coin and Joey’s more popular than Freddie.”

ASR elsewhere renders Antonopoulos as “Andrea Santanopoulos”. He repeats this story in two other interviews, so it is a load-bearing personal account.

On Rare Pepe as the model to differ from:

“So I thought that there was very obvious opportunity for a cartoony mascot that had no hate in it.”

[OTHER] Travis Uhrig, episodes/2021-05-27_WCN_TravisUhrig_AiN2.txt, 27 May 2021. Confidence high. The best lineage statement in the corpus:

“what Curio was essentially had like three parents one of his parents was rare Pepe’s another one was the Bitcoin art show that we were doing and the Bitcoin crack show that happened before that and just the idea of like there are people out there who are like creating art about Bitcoin or selling it for Bitcoin and then the other parent was Doge Dogecoin.”

ASR: “Bitcoin crack show” probably “Bitcoin craft show”.

[OTHER] Travis Uhrig, same episode, on tone:

“Because we wanted it to be fun wanted to be kind of silly wanted to be like very low stress very chill the first website was like block a blogger you know the first mascot wasn’t in the off fiber it was a cartoon character that you thought of it was we wanted to keep it fun and simple because like everyone was getting real serious at the time”

ASR heavily garbled. See Contradiction C6 — Travis appears to say the Fiverr raccoon was not the first mascot; Hunt describes commissioning it as the mascot.

[OTHER] Travis Uhrig, quoted in Curio DAO’s founders series (second-hand from Show Me The Crypto; https://medium.com/@curiocards/...travis-uhrig-a9883e2587c5, 22 June 2023):

“In my mind, Bitcoin needed artists… That’s how you solve the UI problem. You get any kind of creative person involved.”

“if you’re a digital artist, there’s no way to make money on your work — not directly.”

“I remember, when I met Mad Bitcoins, it was like, ‘Oh my gosh,’ I just had a drink with the Mad Bitcoins. I had no idea he lived around here. It’s the guy from the internet. It’s the guy from the show that I watch every week.”

2.2 The San Francisco Bitcoin Meetup

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, AiN4. Confidence high.

“Travis I knew Travis from the San Francisco Bitcoin meetup and Travis had been coming to the meetups as I had Isabella Isabelle and page ran the meetup.”

ASR: “Isabella Isabelle and page” = Isabelle and Paige — he says the names correctly two sentences later.

“And one of the other neat things about San Francisco is that you have to provide free beer and pizza. Otherwise the startup people will not come.”

2.3 Recruiting Rhett Creighton

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, AiN4. Confidence high.

“But so Rick knows everybody in town ricks my like startup guy. And Rick and Ryan both suggest that I meet Rhett Creighton.”

ASR: “ricks my” = “Rick’s my”. Rick Chan and Ryan Singer, advisors.

“Rhett is a nuclear engineer trained at MIT. So if you’re looking to be impressed by a little resume, nuclear engineer trained at MIT comes comes off pretty good for a programmer, right?”

“He’s the little kid in crocodile done to you too. So he is a major child actor.”

ASR: “crocodile done to you too” = Crocodile Dundee II.

On the division of labour:

“We might come up with the framework and we may discuss them, but Rhett’s the one that makes them happen when it comes to the vending machine that you send money to and it comes out with a card that’s Rhett.”

“And I can say it as an idea. It should be a baseball card. But Rhett, the one that made them baseball card. It worked.”

“And so we had rent on as the tech. Then we brought Travis on as kind of like business development to help us get some VC, make some speeches, spread the word about curio cards.”

ASR: “rent” = Rhett.

[OTHER] Rhett Creighton — his only on-record statement about Curio’s origin anywhere, given to OC Ripley and printed in Curio DAO’s founders series part 3 (https://medium.com/@curiocards/...rhett-creighton-13f65bcf4654, 7 July 2023):

“My involvement ended in 2017 and I have no comment on the project beyond that. My mother is an artist and collected tchotchkes in a curio cabinet when I was growing up (which is just a coincidence). I’m sure many other people have artist or collector family members so that is something many people can relate to.”

[OTHER] Travis Uhrig on what Creighton built, same article (re-quoted from a podcast):

“Rhett had to figure out how to make an NFT on Ethereum from scratch. And the only thing that really existed at the time was this type of token called an ERC-20 token, which was used for ICOs. It’s just your basic fungible token. And he had to turn that into a non-divisible, rare collectible, and he also put them into these things we called vending machines, which let anybody be able to send money to Ethereum and get art back. And that’s now how minting works in the ERC-721 Token Standard.”

[OTHER] Travis Uhrig, same article:

“I think it’s really important to state how impressive it was what Rhett accomplished with that code. If he hadn’t been on the project, we wouldn’t be sitting here right now.”

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, same article:

“Rhett created a smart contract for it. He had to make the whole thing work; there were no best practices or standards, or existing frameworks that we could use.”

2.4 The chain not taken

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, AiN4. Confidence high. The single most consequential decision in the project’s history:

“So one of the first ideas we had is that we would make a copy of Ethereum call it curio Ethereum and then we own all the Ethereum, which is great.”

“what we’ve been interesting about that is that the cards would have been orphaned on their own chain and no one would have been mining it and no one would been looking for them.”

ASR: “what we’ve been interesting” = “what would have been interesting”.

[OTHER] Amy Castor and David Gerard give the same decision a different attribution (https://amycastor.com/2022/06/04/the-early-history-of-nfts-curio-cards/, 4 June 2022):

“Creighton suggested that Curio make its own version of Ethereum for the cards. Uhrig pointed out this would leave his digital trading card idea ‘orphaned’ on its own chain, so they stayed on the public Ethereum blockchain.”

Hunt tells it as a collective “we”; Castor and Gerard credit the save to Uhrig specifically. Both go in.**

2.5 The company

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, AiN4. Confidence high.

“Well, we had a little company that we’d started by then called mother dot tech and advise anyone not to buy a dot tech domain name that just cost more money.”

[DOC] The documentary record is messier than the memory, and splits three ways:

• mother.tech — primary, launch day. The artist-application form was originally posted on Bitcointalk (post #7, 9 May 2017, 08:36:32 PM) as a Google Workspace domain-scoped URL: https://docs.google.com/a/mother.tech/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSegSdtjtWI2v4F_es1fNprsIlAnLJhTuVRGZvp7fHTUwn99tw/viewform. It survives inside quoted posts because the domain restriction broke the link for a user, urmom3, who replied: “This google form says I don’t have permission to view it…”
• “Mothership Inc.” — the literal 2017 website footer: <p>&copy; Copyright 2017 | Mothership Inc.</p>
• “Mothership Technology” — only in an unverified, user-submitted Crunchbase bio.

Open question. No incorporation record has been checked. Say “the site’s copyright line read Mothership Inc. and the team’s Google Workspace domain was mother.tech” and nothing more until the California Secretary of State record is pulled.

PART 3 — THE MACHINERY

3.1 How it worked

[DOC] Bitcointalk ANN, 9 May 2017: “Type: ERC20-compliant token / Supply: 100,000 Limited / Divisibility: 0 decimal places.” On chain, each card is its own contract named CardToken, name/symbol of the form Curio17/CRO17, decimals = 0. Separate vending-machine contracts per card, per price tier.

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, AiN4 — the zero-decimal decision and its first casualty:

“When it comes to locking down the cards to a 1.0 value, which actually broke some of the exchanges like ether delta. They were looking for point ones and point twos and we’re like, no, Curio cards are a card. They are indivisible.”

[OTHER] Travis Uhrig, AiN2, from the other side:

“Gerio found two or three bugs in ether delta because how weird are I don’t know if you remember this there was a bug where ether delta didn’t understand non-divisible cards which is Gerio.”

ASR: “Gerio” = Curio.

“so there was a bug where if you did like a tricky order you could buy a card without buying a card or sell a card without selling a card so you’d get the money and the card or you’d lose the money in the card and people were doing stuff like that”

[OTHER] Travis Uhrig, AiN2 — the vending machine, by the man who sold it:

“You go you give the contract money and whatever multiple of money to card you gave you that number of cards back.”

[OTHER] Travis Uhrig, AiN2 — the 2017 problem in nine words:

“They can’t even picture this but there was no marketplace for NFTs. No marketplace.”

“And we didn’t have MetaMass. There was no MetaMass. There was no Uniswap like Uniswap and MetaMass were the two most biggest forward facing things about Ethereum for a lot of people and neither those things.”

ASR: MetaMass = MetaMask. He adds that MetaMask “technically existed but it was like a beta project”.

“Everyone used my ether wallet and so we we had a fork of my ether wall. I think we’re actually potentially the first people ever to fork my ether wallet as well”

A claimed first, which he hedges himself — see Part 4.4.

[OTHER] Travis Uhrig, AiN2 — cards lost and stolen, first-hand:

“I lost some cards on ether delta because again like our job was adoption right so I took some cards and I put them on ether delta to seed the market you know like how cool and how people can buy them and trade them and they were stolen.”

[DOC] Castor and Gerard on the architectural consequence, 4 June 2022:

“NFT coding standards, such as ERC-721 and ERC-1155, did not exist yet, so every detail had to be coded by hand, and each card manually put onto the Ethereum blockchain.”

“As with Rare Pepes, Curio cards ended up being a collection of individual fungible tokens, each tracked by its own smart contract with its own total supply.”

3.2 The warehouse and the burn

[OTHER] Travis Uhrig, AiN2 — the mint-and-burn mechanic, and the misinformation it caused in 2021:

“they thought there were a hundred thousand of some of the cards like cards one through like 13 or something we’ve minted a hundred thousand of them but we never sold a hundred thousand of them that was just like let’s just make a bunch and we’ll figure out how much this all later. And we burned the rest”

[DOC] Bitcointalk thread 1920851, single post 16 May 2017, 09:45:25 PM, by MyCurioCards. Title verbatim:

Curio Cards 4-6 now available! Massive burn destroys Curio Cards 1-3 Warehouse!

Opening, in the Curio character’s voice: “I’m so glad to have shared my Apples, Acorns and Berries with you!” … “I’m Curio in the City now!” Burn evidence given as balanceOf 0x0000...0000 = 97846 on card 1.

[DOC] docs.curio.cards FAQ, on how supply was set:

“For cards 1–10, the supply was decided by the collectors. A large number of Cards were made available, but all the unsold Cards were destroyed at the end of each week. For cards 11–30, the supply was decided by the artist being featured.”

3.3 Pricing

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, AiN4 — the tiered pricing, with numbers:

“for the first three or the first couple sets we were doing different prices we thought that the problem people were buying these is because they weren’t cheap enough right so we would sell like the first hundred for a quarter and the 100 for 50 cents and then the rest of them you could buy for a dollar”

“eventually we’re like okay you know less work for rent just do the normal dollar pricing we’re just going to standardize”

ASR: “rent” = Rhett.

[DOC] Wikipedia: “At launch, they sold for $0.50–$1 each, which was paid to the artists.”

[DOC] buycuriocards.com, archived 18 August 2017 — a Blogger site, not a bespoke build. Post “How to Buy Curio Cards”, published 2017-07-08T12:10:00-07:00. Opening verbatim:

“Curio Cards are digital trading cards on the Ethereum blockchain. All proceeds go directly to the artists. How many Curio Cards can you collect? We suggest starting your collection with a MyCurioWallet.”

Pricing guidance: “send 0.0025 ETH for 1 / send 0.0050 ETH for 2 / send 0.0250 ETH for 10” and “If the Curio Card you selected is SOLD OUT, your Ethereum will be returned.” Countdown widget labelled “New Card Tuesday!”

Do not cite the sidebar “cards left” figures as inventory. They are hand-typed static text, byte-identical in the August 2017 and February 2018 captures.

3.4 New Card Tuesday

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, AiN4:

“We went towards this idea of printing the cards every Tuesday and every Tuesday we’d have a YouTube show with Travis and I called like new card Tuesday and we would promote the new cards.”

[OTHER] Travis Uhrig, AiN2 — Rhett’s weekly workload:

“It just was an accidental deploy twice because red had deploy six contracts each week and there were no deployment tools”

3.5 The first ten cards as a story

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, AiN4, on card 1:

“So of course we chose the apple, which represents the fall from grace and Adam and Eve and all that kind of stuff. Plus Apple computer plus it starts with a all those things like Steve Jobs said.”

On card 10:

“And then 10 was the future card. And this is like off into the future. And you’re going off on your path on your journey.”

On the fundraising intent:

“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.”

“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.”

ASR: “as you can sell” = “as you can tell”. The repetition is his.

[DOC] docs.curio.cards, the Phneep page — the authorship and the creative-direction credit:

“Phneep’s Apples is the first art on Ethereum. His numbering sets the tone for the entire set. Guided by Mad Bitcoins, the first ten cards tell the story of the evolution of mankind into art creators.”

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, 6th Anniversary Retrospective, 10 May 2023 (episodes/2023-05-10_WCN_6thAnniversaryRetrospective.txt, char 660,873) — a story already lost:

“So they say that the first 10 cards tell a story, but it’s been lost.”

3.6 The mascot

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, AiN4:

“I was it first, first take five bucks. I described I wanted the mask to look like an eight. The guy had a cartoony feeling like I just thought it was great.”

The Fiverr raccoon, and the infinity-symbol eye mask.

[OTHER] Travis Uhrig, 6th Anniversary Retrospective (char 71,293):

“He has that infinity symbol around his eyes, just as I suggested and described.”

Contradiction. Both men claim the mask brief. Both agree the raccoon was Hunt’s idea. Travis’s claim was made in an interview with Hunt present and unchallenged. Unresolved — see C7.

PART 4 — THE CLAIM, AND THE FOOTNOTE

4.1 How carefully the founders state it

[OTHER] Travis Uhrig, AiN2, 27 May 2021 — the hedge, stated unprompted. Confidence high:

“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”

ASR: “Ethereum’s” = Ethereans. He repeats this hedge in 2022.

[OTHER] Travis Uhrig, AiN2 — the moment he first suspected it:

“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.”

ASR: opening badly garbled; “rare a conference” probably the Rare Digital Art Festival.

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, AiN4 — the definitive statement, and the one that makes the book possible. Confidence high:

“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.”

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, AiN4 — hedged firsts-claims, valuable because hedged:

“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”

[OTHER] Max Infeld, 6th Anniversary Retrospective (char 229,661):

“I if I’m not mistaken, I think we were the first NFT project.”

4.2 What the ERC-721 standard actually says

This is the single most important correction in the research. The claim “Curio Cards is referenced in the ERC-721 spec” is true. The reference is an exclusionary footnote stating that Curio Cards are not the thing being standardised.

[DOC] EIP-721, Backwards Compatibility section. Fetched from https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ethereum/ERCs/master/ERCS/erc-721.md; rendered at https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-721. Verbatim:

Note: “Limited edition, collectible tokens” like Curio Cards and Rare Pepe are not distinguishable assets. They’re actually a collection of individual fungible tokens, each of which is tracked by its own smart contract with its own total supply (which may be 1 in extreme cases).

It sits immediately after a list headed “Example NFT implementations as of February 2018” (CryptoKitties, CryptoPunks, Auctionhouse Asset Interface).

Re-verified 1 October 2026 by fetching the raw file at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ethereum/ERCs/master/ERCS/erc-721.md. The sentence is present, byte-exact as quoted, in the Backwards Compatibility section, immediately after that three-item list. The file’s front matter reads status: Final, created: 2018-01-24, authors William Entriken (@fulldecent), Dieter Shirley, Jacob Evans, Nastassia Sachs.

And a sharper contrast, found in the same fetch and not previously noted. The standard’s Rationale section names its examples of real NFTs, verbatim:

“Examples of existing or planned NFTs are LAND in Decentraland, the eponymous punks in CryptoPunks, and in-game items using systems like DMarket or EnjinCoin.”

CryptoPunks is cited in the Rationale as an example of what an NFT is. Curio Cards is cited in Backwards Compatibility as an example of what an NFT is not. Same document, two sections apart. That is the whole competitive history of the two projects, written into the standard in February 2018, by people who had looked at both.

[DOC] Curio Cards appears a second time, in the References section under “NFT Implementations and Other Projects”, verbatim:

Curio Cards. https://mycuriocards.com

So the canonical NFT standard links to mycuriocards.com in its bibliography, while its body text says Curio Cards do not qualify.

[DOC] Provenance: the sentence is Dieter Shirley’s, and it predates the EIP file. @dete (Dieter Shirley, CTO of Dapper Labs, named ERC-721 author) posted his “first complete draft” as a comment on the original issue, https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/721#issuecomment-343246872, created 2017-11-09T18:28:25Z, updated_at identical to created_at — never edited. Verbatim:

(It should be noted that “limited edition, collectable tokens” like Curio Cards and Rare Pepe are not non-fungible tokens. They’re actually a collection of individual fungible tokens, each of which is tracked by its own smart contract with its own total supply (which may be 1 in extreme cases).)

[DOC] The EIP file’s first commit already contained it: SHA 31ed49ea42bca57407395dd6ddaadbaaf38ac461, 2018-01-24, author William Entriken, commit message EIP-721 Deed Standard. The sentence has been unchanged since 6 March 2018. ERC-721 went Final 22 June 2018.

[DOC] There was no discussion of Curio Cards in the standards process. All 398 comments on issue #721 were pulled; nine match /curio/i; eight are false positives (“curious”, “Curiously”). The single genuine mention is Shirley’s 9 November 2017 draft. Nobody argued about it, nobody from Curio participated, nobody asked for it to be added or removed.

[DOC] ERC-1155 does not mention Curio Cards at all. A grep of the final text returns zero occurrences — contradicting docs.curio.cards, which claims: “The two most popular NFT standards later developed (ERC721 and ERC1155) reference and share many design elements with Curio Cards.”

[TH-LATER] Against all of that, Thomas Hunt, AiN4 — his memory of the spec:

“And one of the things they said in their little paragraphs, they said, this is a collectible card project similar to Rare Pepe’s or Curio cards.”

“And if they say Curio cards, they must have looked at us. And, yeah, and for science, that’s all we want.”

“And that right there was enough for me, like being in the spec. I was like, we did it. You know, we’re in the spec.”

The defensible formulation. Curio Cards is named twice in ERC-721 — once in Backwards Compatibility, where Dieter Shirley’s November 2017 language excludes “limited edition, collectible tokens” like Curio Cards and Rare Pepe from the definition of a distinguishable asset, and once in the References, linking mycuriocards.com. The standard’s authors cited Curio Cards as the thing ERC-721 was not. That is a better story than the inspiration version, and it is true.

4.3 The competing candidates, dated on chain

Date trap. Etheria v1.2 is 1 November 2015 in UTC. Secondary timelines say 31 October 2015 — that is the US-local rendering of 01:20 UTC.

This settles “six weeks before CryptoPunks”:

• Curio Card 1 → CryptoPunks V1 = 30 days 7 hours — one month
• Curio Card 1 → CryptoPunks V2 = 44 days — six weeks

The widely repeated “six weeks” (docs.curio.cards, nft now, Castor and Gerard) measures to the 22 June relaunch and silently ignores the 9 June V1 deployment. Both are defensible only once you say which CryptoPunks you mean.

[DOC] Gerard and Castor caught the same move from the CryptoPunks side (https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2022/06/16/..., 16 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.”

“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.”

PixelMap is the live gap

PixelMap is on Ethereum, it is images, and it predates 9 May 2017 by nearly six months. No source on any side — not the press, not Wikipedia, not docs.curio.cards — reasons through why PixelMap does not count. The project’s own carve-out addresses virtual land (Etheria) and other networks (Rare Pepe) and is silent on PixelMap. Etheria’s FAQ lists it as a real entrant.

The honest distinction available: PixelMap is a user-supplied canvas, not a curated edition of works by named artists released as a show. That distinction is defensible — but it is a distinction, and it has to be made, not assumed.

Etheria’s claim, and the move it shares with Curio’s

[DOC] https://www.etheria.world/faq.html:

“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.” [bold in original]

[DOC] But Etheria’s own 2015 copy, preserved on the same site at https://www.etheria.world/whatis.html and flagged there as “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 in 2021 — exactly the move the Curio claim depends on. Both pages are live on etheria.world today.

[DOC] Etheria’s priority tweet, https://x.com/etheria_feed/status/1370825688647884802, 13 March 2021 19:54:47 UTC (snowflake-verified):

“1/ I hear that NFTs have become a thing. Here is some essential about Etheria, the first NFT project ever deployed to the Ethereum blockchain all the way back in October 2015 and presented at DEVCON1.”

Not verified: the DEVCON1 demo. It rests entirely on Etheria’s own FAQ plus secondary echoes. No Ethereum Foundation source, schedule or recording was found. Flag it if the book leans on it, because it does real work in Etheria’s claim.

Larva Labs quietly changed its own claim

[DOC] Wayback captures of larvalabs.com/cryptopunks:

• 1 June 2018 — no “first NFT” sentence exists 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.

“The first” → “one of the earliest”, somewhere between 31 March and 31 October 2021 — a window containing both the Curio rediscovery and the Christie’s sale. Assert the bracket, not a date (an August 2021 capture attempt hit Wayback HTTP 429). Absent in 2018, asserted by March 2021, hedged by October 2021.

Quantum, Rare Pepe, Spells of Genesis

Counterparty and Namecoin assets cannot compete for “first on Ethereum” at all; they compete for “first tokenised art.”

[DOC] Guinness World Records, record 15-696336: Quantum, Kevin McCoy, “When: 05 May 2014”. Most press says 3 May 2014. Unresolved — report both. Guinness is sloppy in the same sentence, calling Namecoin both “a blockchain software modelled from Bitcoin’s code” and saying Quantum was “created via Bitcoin.”

[DOC] Guinness also records Anil Dash’s disavowal:

“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: RAREPEPE Series 1 Card 1, edition of 300, issued 13 September 2016, Bitcoin block 428919 — secondary consensus only, nothing verified on chain. Spells of Genesis FDCARD: announced https://everdreamsoft.medium.com/introducing-the-fdcard-a56b19611000, byline 27 April 2015.

4.4 Press, graded by hedge

Clean chain of hedge propagation: CoinDesk (17 Sep 2021) → CNBC (1 Oct 2021, near-verbatim) → Wikipedia (cites CNBC).

[DOC] Christie’s made a broader claim than the founders ever did. The project’s own docs are more careful than the auction house, and more careful than the press:

“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).”

That two-part carve-out — category and network — is the most defensible version anyone has written. Note what it omits: PixelMap.

[DOC] Wikipedia contains three non-identical formulations, and a fourth elsewhere. The NFT article says:

“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” appears in neither cited source. It is unsourced editorial work by an anonymous contributor — and arguably the most technically accurate published formulation of the claim anywhere.

[DOC] Castor and Gerard are the only published source that states the Etheria exception in the same breath as the Curio claim (4 June 2022) — probably the structure the book should adopt:

“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.”

What the chain can and cannot settle. The chain records deployment order. It cannot record 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.” Every defensible version of the Curio claim is a claim about categories — and the categories were drawn in 2021 and applied backwards. Nobody in 2017 was competing to be first at anything called an NFT; the word did not exist in that usage until ERC-721.

The strongest honest formulation the evidence supports: the first curated art NFT project on Ethereum — a show of numbered editions by named artists — deployed 9 May 2017, one month before the first CryptoPunks contract and six weeks before the CryptoPunks relaunch; 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).

PART 5 — THE FAILURE

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, AiN4 — the legal fear:

“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.”

[OTHER] Travis Uhrig, AiN2 — the same fear, independently:

“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.”

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, AiN4 — why artists went unpaid for cards:

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

[DOC] Curio DAO’s own founders series, part 1 (10 June 2023) — the project’s own word for it:

“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.”

[OTHER] Travis Uhrig on the lean years, quoted by Castor and Gerard:

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

They add that he “could barely give the virtual cards away on a Discord channel.”

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, AiN4 — why the vending machines had to be reverse-engineered:

“Travis edited the webpage to remove the ability to go to the vending machines because you know we didn’t want people to buy these sadly worthless cards”

[OTHER] Travis Uhrig, AiN2 — confirming, in his own terms:

“I had to buy them because you know the shop was closed you know if I could have turned off the vending machines I would have.”

Flag. “I had to buy them” is likely “I had to bury them” — the preceding sentence is “I had to remove all the information in the website.” Do not quote as “buy” without noting the garble.

“Because it is like it is almost like a liability at that point. Because I don’t know what’s going to happen to that money is just kind of sitting there”

“Their card wasn’t available on your scan not out of any like hatred of open source was just more like it wasn’t important at the time.”

ASR: “your scan” = Etherscan; “Their card” probably “the code”. Why the vending-machine code was unverified — banality, not secrecy.

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, AiN4 — on CryptoKitties:

“I already you know I was already kind of bitter about crypto kitties right because that comes out in the same year”

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, AiN4 — the loneliness of being early, in a Clubhouse room in early 2021:

“Well you know 2017 I made a bunch at these and we were referenced in the ERC 721 spec and and the just dead silence for the room nobody understands what I’m saying”

Travis describes an almost identical Clubhouse moment independently.

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, AiN4 — the chicken-and-egg, four months before Christie’s resolved it:

“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.”

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, AiN4 — unusually bleak, from a co-creator:

“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.”

PART 6 — THE REDISCOVERY

6.1 March 2021

[OTHER] Adam McBride, quoted in SuperRare editorial by Luke Whyte, https://superrare.com/curation/editorial/11865:

“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.”

“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.”

Date caveat. The page now carries 15 April 2025, but internal evidence (it says the Christie’s set “will go on auction… this October”, cites data “as of August 7th”) puts original publication around August/September 2021. Treat the on-page date as a CMS artefact.

The MoonCats trigger tweet is 12 March 2021, which puts Curio at ~13 March 2021.

[DOC] Castor and Gerard, 4 June 2022 — the GitHub find:

“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.”

Note the spelling. The handle in the documented record is @DieAping. The account is deleted. “Dyaping” is a transcription artefact of the shows. Do not print either spelling as settled.

[DOC] OrangutanCapital, Medium, byline 15 March 2021 (metadata shows a later revision, 5 August 2021 — cite both) — the best contemporaneous account:

“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…”

Harry BTC’s tutorial tweet: https://twitter.com/HarryBTC/status/1370969955349491713 — 14 March 2021. McBride’s investigative thread: https://twitter.com/adamamcbride/status/1371226231140671489 — 15 March 2021. Existence and dates documented by third-party contemporaneous citation; the text of neither tweet was read. Do not quote their contents.

[OTHER] Travis Uhrig, AiN2 — the decisive fact of the rediscovery:

“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”

“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.”

Flag prominently — the transcript reverses his meaning. Almost certainly “If you weren’t on the Bitcointalk forums you weren’t a serious project.”

“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.”

“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.”

Travis’s own use of “archaeological”.

[OTHER] Travis Uhrig, AiN2 — his two-phase framing:

“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.”

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, AiN4 — the first sign, from the inside:

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

Daniel Friedman, Max Infeld and Robek each independently describe the same “got any cards” messages — a four-witness beat.

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, AiN4 — the counterfactual that explains why 2021 worked and 2017 did not:

“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”

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, AiN4 — the emotional whiplash, in one breath:

“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.”

“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.”

“It’s that four-year gap. It’s that time that’s made them presumably valuable.”

“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”

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, AiN4 — the payoff:

“And then they did exactly what I thought they do. They took a picture of it and they posted it on the internet.”

“People collected sets of the things that we made to be collected into sets. So that’s the whole thing all right there. I don’t need anything else.”

[OTHER] Adam McBride, AiN4 — the sentence that proves he is the interviewer. Confidence high:

“congratulations to you honestly because you were there obviously you’ve been you’ve been involved in the space for a long time but to be involved with Curio at the beginning congratulations for doing that man good good on you”

[OTHER] Adam McBride, AiN4. Confidence medium-high:

“even though it is the first art project on Ethereum as of right now, you know, will it get that intense, you know, fervor”

[OTHER] Adam McBride, from his own Medium — the one place he writes about Curio in published prose (https://adamamcbride.medium.com/2017-nft-art-project-is-burning-your-nft-true-ownership-or-just-the-ultimate-flex-341fb7b68dc9, 9 May 2021, Curio’s fourth anniversary):

“I also acknowledge that Curio Cards — which were released before CryptoPunks — is art.”

“I mean dogs sitting around a card table is an art that I can get behind. Even put on the wall in my office.”

“But no matter how much I love Curio Cards it’s not ‘high art’ IMO.”

Finding: McBride never published a Medium article about Curio Cards. His complete sitemap — 19 posts — contains none. His Curio output was a Twitter thread, podcast episodes and interviews.

[OTHER] Adam McBride, quoted by Castor and Gerard, 4 June 2022:

“You could put in your Google form to be part of Curio Cards, and he got it in too late and was denied,” Adam McBride, an “NFT Archeologist” who spends countless hours per day researching early NFT projects, told us. “If XCOPY was part of the Curio Cards, it would have been a whole different story.”

“For a while, people were just doing OTC trades through the Curio Discord, and that is just kind of trusting people,” says McBride.

Do not print the McBride line “The idea of having a failed business and then magically four years later it becomes successful is just impossible. And it actually happened to these guys” — attributed to Quartz on the 1n2.org wiki, not verified; the Quartz body is gated.

6.2 Card 17 and 17b

[DOC] On chain:

• Card 17: 0xF59536290906F204C3c7918D40C1Cc5f99643d0B — created 20 June 2017 21:50:49 UTC
• Card 17b: 0xE0B5E6F32d657e0e18d4B3E801EBC76a5959e123 — created 20 June 2017 07:05:52 UTC, block 3902088, via a different factory 0xeca65Be784e2B0F1956D266c1237481a511a19FB

17b was deployed roughly 14 hours 45 minutes BEFORE card 17. Both named Curio17/CRO17, both totalSupply 500. The misprint is a June artefact, not a May one, and it postdates CryptoPunks V1 by eleven days.

Error in the Christie’s listing: Christie’s gives the same address for both 17 and 17b (0xF595…). That is card 17’s contract.

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, AiN4 — the most important sentence on the bug:

“I think ret told me something like I was late night I screwed up the contract I had to do it twice”

[OTHER] Travis Uhrig, AiN2 — and he says he never knew:

“Card that I didn’t know about they’re like hey what about the 17 B and I’m like there’s no 17 B what is that you’re getting scam.”

“But no and I actually thought for why I told people like don’t buy it because there must be something wrong with it right the only reason why we would have deployed it twice is if there was a mistake.”

“My first guess was we used the wrong IPFS hash because I remember that did happen there was a card that was deployed at the wrong IPFS hash but that would never went up for sale so it doesn’t matter.”

A second, distinct, otherwise-undocumented contract bug. Worth chasing.

“And 17 wasn’t the only one that was deployed twice because of the mistake or or whatever a couple of them were deployed twice but 17 was the only one that the machine is also deployed those only when you actually buy the other ones are just inaccessible.”

Crucial and under-reported: several cards were double-deployed; only 17 had a second vending machine too. That is the technical reason 17b exists as a tradeable card and the others do not.**

[OTHER] Travis Uhrig, CoinDesk, 17 September 2021 — the published version:

“Cards 17, 18 and 19 were all initially misprinted, but there was a mistake that made 18 and 19 unsellable,” explained Uhrig. “Back in 2017, nobody cared that you had test code on Ethereum. We just re-deployed all three after fixing [the error]. People eventually found [card #17b] because it lives on the blockchain. The market has definitely spoken, people think of it as an essential in a full set.”

[DOC] docs.curio.cards FAQ — the project’s fullest account:

“Lack of testing frameworks and low gas costs made “testing on mainnet” common practice at the time of the project’s development. When Cards 17, 18, and 19 were deployed and tested, an issue with the vending machines was found that made Cards 18 and 19 unpurchaseable. The issue was fixed, all of the week’s contracts were redeployed, and Cards 17–19 were officially released.

However, the first 17 Card still worked. Its vending machine wasn’t affected and still allowed purchasing. At the time, it wasn’t listed for purchase, and was simply forgotten about; a leftover artifact of a standard test deployment.”

[OTHER] Adam McBride, Castor and Gerard, 4 June 2022 — and he contradicts the docs:

“I don’t think anyone knows exactly what happened with 17b, but it was briefly released,” McBride said. “One person who is actually in the Discord was able to get, I don’t know how many 17b’s, before they realized their mistake and turned off the contract.”

The on-chain record supports the docs, not McBride. 497 of 500 eventually sold, which a contract disabled in 2017 could not have produced.

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, AiN6, 7 June 2021. Confidence high — the speaker gives “my perspective”, then turns to Robek with “uh what did you think should there be a misprint card”, so this is the host, not the guest.

“as i recall uh rat made an error uh there was something wrong with the contract and he had to do it twice so there became two of these cards”

ASR: “rat” = Rhett. The AiN6 transcript is entirely lower-case and unpunctuated — a different transcription pass from the other episodes. The same passage recurs, re-punctuated, in the 6th Anniversary Retrospective at char 337,395 as “as Lee says, I recall, uh, rat made an error.”

Correction note. An earlier draft of this quote bank attributed this line to Robek, capitalised its first words, and inserted “[Rhett]” inside the quotation. All three were wrong. The text above is byte-exact from episodes/2021-06-07_WCN_Robek_AiN6.txt at char 63,381.

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, TBG #250, 19 March 2021 — six days after the rediscovery:

“there’s actually a fork on card 17. 17 the UASF card. I don’t know what happened. My theory is that ret made mistake and then fixed it but there are two different versions”

ASR: “ret” = Rhett. Verified byte-exact at char 50,002 of episodes/2021-03-19_TBG250.txt.

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, AiN4 — the coincidence as fate:

“but during the readiscence of these key or cards this 17 card was discovered as this alternate contract and it couldn’t have happened on a better card right because this is u a s f”

ASR: “readiscence” = rediscovery; “key or cards” = Curio cards. Card 17 is UASF — a card about a chain fork, which forked.

“and just like in our cards buy I think lucky accident there were two 17 cards”

[OTHER] Travis Uhrig, AiN2:

“so it’s really just kind of a happy accident that reds error came up on this the fork card.”

6.3 The wrapper, and what it cost

[OTHER] Travis Uhrig, AiN2 — the best aphorism in the corpus, and the whole reason a wrapper was needed:

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

“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.”

[DOC] docs.curio.cards:

“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).”

[DOC] Addresses: official ERC-1155 wrapper 0x73DA73EF3a6982109c4d5BDb0dB9dd3E3783f313 (2021); 17b-only wrapper 0x04AfA589E2b933f9463C5639f412b183Ec062505 (2022); community alternate 0x3c2754c0cdc5499df1a50d608d8985070bf87b30.

Open question. No official source names who built the wrapper, or who audited it. docs.curio.cards says only “a joint effort by the community and members of the original Curio team” and that it was “reviewed by an external solidity auditor”. docs.curio.cards/dao-and-contribution/team names Moon (@TheMoonOfficia2) as “2021 official curio wrapper solidity developer” and Kian Bradley (@kee_in) as “2021 wrapper site and website developer” — routinely omitted from press accounts.

[DOC] OrangutanCapital, 15 March 2021, written days after it happened, with a live warning at the top:

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

“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.”

The author discloses personal loss: “…and lost one of two rarer cards that I purchased peer-to-peer in the faulty wrapper contract (my ape tendencies to blame).”

[DOC] Castor and Gerard, 4 June 2022, use the community’s word:

“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.’”

“As a result, Card #26 became the rarest card — only 105 were still tradeable — and the biggest bottleneck to getting a full set.”

[DOC] docs.curio.cards:

“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.”

How many card 26s were locked — the best-sourced figure is five

[OTHER] Travis Uhrig, CoinDesk, 17 September 2021 — a co-founder on the record:

“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

No source at all was found for “3”. The shows give three, five and six; the documentary record gives five.

To settle it in one line: read balanceOf(lockedWrapper) on card 26’s contract 0x1cB5BF4Be53eb141B56f7E4Bb36345a353B5488c, or take CCSupply’s Card_Supply_Verbose.csv from https://ccsupply.xyz/, which treats the faulty wrapper as a burn address.

How many complete sets — four numbers, all defensible, none interchangeable

[DOC] The 2024 correction matters most, and inverts the received story — card 26 stopped being the bottleneck. nft now, Matt Medved, 11 March 2024:

“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.“

[DOC] The project’s own explanation of why totals differ, docs.curio.cards FAQ:

“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.”

[OTHER] Daniel Friedman, 6th Anniversary Retrospective (char 95,195):

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

[OTHER] Travis Uhrig, same episode (char 583,637):

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

[OTHER] Travis Uhrig, 7th Anniversary (char 79,258):

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

6.4 Christie’s, 1 October 2021

[DOC] Lot 1, sale 29238, Post-War to Present, New York. https://www.christies.com/lot/lot-6337619. Title: “CURIO CARDS (EST. 2017) / Full set of 30 cards plus 17b”. Medium line: “non-fungible tokens, ERC-1155”. Wallet 0xD035a780DECCF7808875c6a555937B7c44299F45. Auctioneer on the rostrum: Rahul Kadakia. Head of sale: Isabella Lauria.

[DOC] Estimate: 250–350 ETH. USD equivalents vary by source because ETH moved between 17 September and 1 October; CoinDesk gave $870,000–$1.3 million. Report the ETH band as the fact and the USD band as date-dependent.

Do not cite the estimate line from the live Christie’s page. It currently renders “Estimate ETH 805,548 – ETH 1,127,767” against “Price realised ETH 393” — mutually impossible; a currency-toggle artefact in Christie’s present template.

[DOC] The two price figures resolved: 320 ETH is the hammer; 393 ETH is the price realised including buyer’s premium.

Artnet News, Eileen Kinsella, 4 October 2021, which states its own convention — “as always, final prices include auction-house fees; presale estimates do not”:

“The sale kicked off with a set of Curio Cards, said to be the first art NFTs minted on the Etherium blockchain. Christie’s accepted live bids in Ether cryptocurrency for the set of 30 cards plus 17b (a reference to a rare misprint that was included with the set, making a total of 31 NFTs). The group sold for ETH393 ($1.3 million), exceeding the high estimate of ETH350.”

Wikipedia gives ETH393 ($1,267,320). Arithmetic corroboration: $1,267,320 ÷ 393 = $3,224.73/ETH; $1,034,377 ÷ 320 = $3,232.43/ETH — the same ETH/USD rate, i.e. two expressions of one sale. Applying Christie’s 2021 New York premium tiers to a $1.035M hammer yields ≈$1.278M, within rounding.

One source conflicts and should be reported as conflicting. Curio DAO’s own retrospective, 14 January 2022, calls 393 ETH a bid: “The winning bidder was none other than Ethereum co-founder Taylor Gerring with a bid of 393 ETH, exceeding Christie’s estimate of 250–350 ETH and nearly quadrupling the previous Full Set sale price of 107 ETH.” The weight of evidence is against the project’s own wording. Useful comparator from the same passage: the previous full-set sale was 107 ETH.

[OTHER] Noah Davis, head of digital art at Christie’s, CoinDesk, 17 September 2021:

“A true full set of Curio Cards is one of the few holy grails as far as art projects on Ethereum go,” said Noah Davis, head of digital art at Christie’s. “It’s the first of its kind, predating Punks, even.”

“I’ve been bidding in auctions on behalf of clients for almost a decade,” said Davis, the Christie’s digital art lead. “I’ve placed bids in USD, GBP and EUR – always fiat. To think I’m going to hear the auctioneer calling out my bids in ETH, that’s just incredible. It doesn’t happen.”

[DOC] CoinDesk, 17 September 2021: “The Oct. 1 auction also marks the first time Christie’s live bidding will be denominated in cryptocurrency instead of the usual local currency.”

[DOC] The Christie’s lot essay, on the Robek cards — and note it never uses the word “founder” and gives no surnames:

“Card nos. 21 through 23, by Robek World, depict three of the IRL members of the Curio team in a loose and campy cartoon style—Tom (The Wizard (who is also very obviously MadBitcoins)), Travis (The Bard) and Rhett (The Barbarian).”

[DOC] The lot essay, much-quoted:

“The Cards are a convoluted and motley array of surrealist-tinged kitsch, anti-corporate/pro-decentralization satire, slapstick cartoons, high-minded abstraction and hijinks.”

[DOC] The lot essay on totals: “There are a total of almost 30,000 Curio Cards in existence, with an estimated 4,000 currently lost or effectively destroyed.”

[DOC] Context, Artnet 4 October 2021: the 200-plus-lot sale realised $34.4 million against a $19m–$28m presale range. Top lots at $2.67m each (Frankenthaler, Guston). The sale “was bookended by NFTs” — Dread Scott’s White Male for Sale closed it at $32,000.

The buyer

Status: credibly reported by two independent sources, self-identified, not confirmed by any primary record read.

• Castor and Gerard, 4 June 2022: “Taylor Gerring, an early contributor to the Ethereum project, was the buyer” — hyperlinked to https://twitter.com/TaylorGerring/status/1444300130316963843, 2 October 2021, the day after the sale. The tweet was not read.
• Curio DAO, 14 January 2022: “Ethereum co-founder Taylor Gerring.”
• Wikipedia names no buyer and says the set was “sold by an anonymous seller.”

Recommended handling: state that Gerring publicly identified himself as the buyer the day after the sale, prefer “early contributor to the Ethereum project” over “co-founder”, and mark the identification as reported and self-identified, not confirmed by Christie’s — which does not publish buyer identities.

6.5 Sotheby’s, Svalbard, Taschen, Wikipedia

[DOC] Sotheby’s: confirmed to have existed; price NOT established. Natively Digital 1.2: The Collectors, Sotheby’s Metaverse, 14–21 October 2021 — 53 NFT lots from 19 collectors. Lot URL https://metaverse.sothebys.com/natively-digital/lots/curio-cards-complete-set-1-30-plus-17b, independently corroborated by Wayback captures 20211015005444, 20211016085020, 20211026144202.

Curio DAO, 14 January 2022:

“Curio Cards at Sotheby’s — Closely following this event was Curio Cards’ appearance at Sotheby’s. A Full Set was sold at their week-long Metaverse auction. This second sale by a mainstream auction house confirmed what the Christie’s auction had demonstrated — the legitimacy of Curio Cards in the art world.”

The price is an honest gap. The live URL now redirects; archived snapshots are an empty JavaScript shell. A search engine surfaced an unattributed “more than 100 ETH ($260,000)” which could not be traced to any source and should not be printed.

[DOC] Svalbard — confirmed, but via a specific third-party programme, and not the GitHub Arctic Code Vault. It is the Non-Fungible Vault, a project of TopDog Studios, depositing into the Arctic World Archive.

TopDog’s announcement, 2 December 2021, https://topdogbeachclub.com/blog/introducing-the-top-dog-non-fungible-vault/, names Curio Cards in the partner list:

“Curio Cards: First NFTs on Ethereum that helped define the ERC721 and ERC1155 standards we know today.”

Mechanism: “We’re etching NFTs (including the art and provenance information) onto special purpose-built silver-halide film that is designed to last for over 1,000 years. The films are then stored in a decommissioned coal mine in the Svalbard archipelago.” Curio is listed in Cohort One.

Arctic World Archive’s own blog, 16 March 2022, confirms the deposit and dates the ceremony to 17 March 2022 in Longyearbyen — but does not name Curio Cards. Curio’s inclusion rests on TopDog’s partner listings plus Curio DAO’s own January 2022 post.

Quotable from that page — Paul Price, TopDog founder:

“Traditional art has stood the test of time with pieces created some 45,000 years ago still in existence, yet NFTs minted 45 days ago are already missing.”

Re-verified 1 October 2026 by fetching all three primary pages. Confirmed verbatim: the 2 December 2021 publication date; the COHORT ONE partner listing (topdogbeachclub.com/non-fungible-vault/); the Curio description “First NFTs on Ethereum that helped define the ERC721 and ERC1155 standards we know today”, which appears on both TopDog pages; and the silver-halide mechanism sentence, which is on the programme page, not the blog post, and ends “…known as the Arctic World Archive.”

Attribution of the 45,000-years line established. The Arctic World Archive post of 16 March 2022 attributes it to Paul Price, founder and managing director of TopDog Studios, and renders it with “pieces created some 45,000 years ago”. Note that the TopDog blog post renders the same line as “pieces envisioned some 45,000 years ago”. Two wordings exist; cite the AWA post and use “created”.

Sharper finding than previously recorded. Both TopDog pages still describe the first deposit in the future tense (“The first deposit will take place in early 2022”). The AWA post confirms the ceremony happened on 17 March 2022, quotes Price and Rune Bjerkestrand of Piql, and gives “over 70,000 unique pieces of art” — but names no individual collection. So no source outside TopDog and the project itself places Curio’s cards in the deposit.

Correction to the 1n2.org wiki — now fixed. It attributed Curio’s Svalbard preservation to the GitHub Arctic Code Vault and a 2 February 2020 snapshot, and said “Card #21 (Mad Bitcoins)” where card 20 is MadBitcoins. Both corrected 1 October 2026, along with the artist mapping, the 18/19 title swap, the card 26 figures, the CryptoPunks launch date, and an unverified quotation attributed to Adam McBride. The nightly generator prompt that seeded the error was hardened at the same time. Full record: ~/brain/_research/curio_book/CORRECTION-arctic-2026-10-01.md.

The GitHub Arctic Code Vault is a real but different programme depositing a bulk snapshot of public source code into the same facility; the AWA’s own post about the TopDog deposit links to it in the margin, which is the likely source of the conflation. Whether any Curio repository was swept into that snapshot was not checked and would be a claim about code, not artwork.

[TH-THEN / OTHER] The project’s own post-ceremony assertions, recovered from brain.db and dated from tweet snowflake IDs:

@MyCurioCards, 14 May 2022 18:39 UTC (1525546470073438208) — two months after the ceremony:

“Curio Cards’ history and art was sealed for 1000+ years in the Non-Fungible Vault at the Arctic World Archive! Ever hold a Card before the snapshot? You are in the vault and eligible for the Snowy Curio @POAPxyz!”

@MyCurioCards, 31 January 2025 23:54 UTC (1885476835296711029):

“Reminder that Curio Cards are one of a handful of projects stored in the Non-Fungible Vault at the Arctic World Archive in Longyearbyen, Norway. This means even in the event of nuclear fallout, humanity will still be able to experience Curio Cards.”

Also in the archive: a 19 April 2022 post by another account about “depositing Curio Cards NFT into the Non-Fungible Vault”, and a 9 August 2022 reply calling Curio “one of the firsts to join @TopDogStudios’ Non-Fungible Vault”. All consistent on the programme; none independent of the project’s circle.

[DOC] Taschen — confirmed. Robert Alice, On NFTs, TASCHEN, revised ed. 22 October 2025, pp. 46–47, ISBN 978-3836593458. This is Wikipedia’s reference 1 and is load-bearing for Wikipedia’s opening factual sentences. The spread is photographed in @MyCurioCards tweet 1765737920994963810, 7 March 2024.

cryptograffiti’s cards 11–13 excluded from Taschen for permissions — UNVERIFIED. Targeted searches found nothing supporting it. Cards 11–13 are precisely the ones altering third-party corporate marks (card 12 is a MasterCard logo reading “MineBitcoin”), which makes a permissions problem plausible — but plausibility is not evidence. The spread photo or the book settles presence; the reason would still need cryptograffiti’s or Robert Alice’s own word.

NFT Yearbook — NOT SUBSTANTIATED. The publication exists (begun February 2022). No source places Curio Cards in it. Neither Curio DAO’s posts nor the docs mention it, which is telling — the project reliably publicises this kind of inclusion.

[DOC] Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curio_Cards, read 30 September 2026 — four paragraphs, seven references. Verbatim, in part:

“Curio Cards was developed by Travis Uhrig, Thomas Hunt, and Rhett Creighton, and launched on May 9, 2017. At launch, they sold for $0.50–$1 each, which was paid to the artists. … Curio Cards are colloquially considered to be the first collection of NFT artworks on the Ethereum blockchain. On October 1, 2021, a complete collection of Curio Cards, including the digital misprint ‘17b’, was sold by an anonymous seller for $1.2 million at Christie’s Post-War to Present auction held in New York. This was the first Christie’s auction where bidding was conducted solely using Ethereum cryptocurrency.”

What Wikipedia does not say: nothing about the rediscovery, McBride, the archaeologists, the wrapper, the locked cards, Sotheby’s, the Arctic archive, the DAO, the royalty, the 111/106 set maths, or the buyer. And the “ERC-721 references Curio Cards” claim — central to the project’s self-presentation — does not appear on Wikipedia at all.

6.6 The royalty, and the DAO

[DOC] docs.curio.cards FAQ:

“All of the Card vending machines from 2017 are sold out, where one hundred percent of the sales revenue went to the original artists. The community voted for a 1% royalty fee on all OpenSea trades to be equally allocated to the artists. No OpenSea cut is taken by the team or community. Curio Cards has always been about supporting artists and promoting digital artwork as a medium.”

Proposal: https://governance.curio.cards/#/proposal/QmU61U2bux8io9VrVKGd9pmSfn7v5WDQ1o9EooSGe3qYhu

Note the exact wording: “equally allocated to the artists” — an equal split across the seven, not pro-rata by card. And the two numbers describe one arrangement: 1% is the fee rate, 100% is the artists’ share of it. They get conflated constantly.

[DOC] Curio DAO, January 2022, on the DAO’s purpose:

“It was envisioned that the purpose of guild presence was to assist community-driven decisions, support the artists, and protect the historic value of the Curio Cards project; in short, to be a coordination tool, not a speculative investment tool.“

[DOC] Curio DAO, January 2022, on the wrapper’s aftermath: “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.” Holder growth: “rising well above 4000 unique card-owners… At the time of writing, the holder count was over 4800.”

[DOC] A documented downstream use, Curio DAO January 2022: “Cryptopop has continued to collaborate, building the Cryptopop Art Guild in the Philippines, where some of his Curio Cards royalties are going toward mentorship and community establishment for young underprivileged artists.”

Curio+ / cards 31–60 is a separate project. No official Curio source — not the docs, not the FAQ, not the Curio DAO Medium — mentions Curio+ or cards 31+ at all. The docs are emphatic: “Anyone can use the original 2017 token factory to make a new NFT with the (now wildly outdated) Curio NFT standard. However, any tokens made this way are not associated with the original collection.“ Treat Curio+ as a separate project in the Curio lineage unless Thomas’s own records show otherwise.

PART 7 — THE ARTISTS

[DOC] Authoritative mapping, docs.curio.cards and https://docs.curio.cards/llms.txt:

Three corrections to the commonly repeated version. (1) It is “Thoros of Myr”, not “Thoros of Mirror” — the latter is purely a transcription artefact; Thoros of Myr is a Game of Thrones character. (2) “Max Infeld” is not an eighth artist — Marisol Vengas is his pseudonym. (3) Cards 1–10 are Phneep’s, not an anonymous “Curio Series” as the 2017 site’s artist list implied; Christie’s agrees, and the docs add the creative-direction credit to Hunt.

Errors in the 1n2.org wiki that have begun propagating into search results: it says “Phneep — Created Cards 1–9 and 17” and “Cryptograffiti — Created Cards 10–13”, and it swaps 18 and 19 (18 is To The Moon, 19 is Dogs Trading). The wiki is nightly AI-generated from transcripts and must not be cited — it would be circular as well as wrong.

[DOC] mycuriocards.com, archived 20 July 2017 — the promise, in the project’s own words:

“All proceeds from the sale of cards 21-23 go directly to the artist, @robek_world”

and one week later:

“All proceeds from the sale of cards 11-13 go directly to the artist, @cryptograffiti”

Page title: “Curio Cards - The Future of Collectibles”. H1: “Start Collecting Today”. Verbatim elsewhere: “Every Tuesday!” / “New Announcements, Limited Supply!” Footer: “Artists Wanted: Do you have what it takes to design your own cards?” and “© Copyright 2017 | Mothership Inc.”

[DOC] mycuriocards.com, 18 January 2018 — the redesign, naming six artists (Thoros of Myr, Marisol Vengas, Daniel Friedman, Robek World, Cryptopop, Cryptograffiti, with Phneep present but commented out). FAQ verbatim:

“Curio Card’s mission is to create a platform for artists and collectors that finally benefits artists.”

“Curio is changing that.”

Marisol Vengas, and Christie’s getting it wrong

[DOC] docs.curio.cards states it outright:

“Marisol Vengas was also the pseudonym for real-life Max Infeld, the Chico-based artist whose featured work in Curio Cards was one that explored social engagement in art.”

Same page: “It was his friend, Mad Bitcoins in the Bitcoin community (featured in Card 20), that informed him about Curio Cards and encouraged him to submit his art”, and “His submissions are considered among the first known represented ‘generative’ artworks on Ethereum.”

[OTHER] Max Infeld confirms it himself, AiN5, 3 June 2021. Two separate sentences from the same answer, three hundred characters apart — given separately here rather than joined by an ellipsis, so each can be located:

“And yeah, being an artist, I’ve made a ton of different artistic personalities and aliases.”

Verified at char 1,074 of episodes/2021-06-03_WCN_MaxInfeld_AiN5.txt. The same passage recurs in the 6th Anniversary Retrospective at char 227,816, re-transcribed with a tense change — “I had made a ton of different artistic personalities” — a clean small illustration of why two Whisper passes over the same audio should not be treated as two sources.

“So I didn’t get Max art. I got Marisol Vengus art.”

Verified at char 1,378 of the same file.

And at the Curio Plus drop party, 7 October 2021:

“the series that I made was called Marisol Vengas. And it’s also a pseudonym in Aelius”

ASR: “in Aelius” = “an alias”.

[DOC] Christie’s says the opposite, in print, in the lot essay:

“In truth, Vengas is an anonymous artist collective comprised of various members who have never met in the physical world—essentially, a decentralized living artist.”

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt’s account sits between the two, AiN4:

“Max infeld was involved in setting up Marisol Vengus collective”

and, pressed:

“Marisol is not a person this was Max and other people as well are just basically Max doing this art as an alias”

Both go in. Christie’s is wrong on authorship, but is describing something real about method — the docs describe cafe sessions where “Passing strangers would stop by and color, assemble or be in charge of the composition.” That is the probable root of the “collective” framing.

How the artists were found

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, AiN4 — the selection criterion:

“we found a Daniel Friedman’s entry and what I liked about it had a flicker page with lots of other artwork it was clearly hand drawn with the pen and the ink”

The test was proof a human made the work — driven by fear of accidentally publishing stolen art.

[OTHER] Daniel Friedman, 6th Anniversary Retrospective (char 88,734) — honest about his own memory:

“the beginning is shrouded in forgetfulness for me. I don’t remember exactly how I got the web form”

[OTHER] cryptograffiti initiated the art strand by walking up at a meetup and saying he made art about crypto. Max Infeld was known to Hunt via Hunt’s brother and Burning Man, and submitted five aliases, of which Marisol Vengas was accepted. Luis Buenaventura was met at the SF Bitcoin Meetup, having flown from the Philippines, introduced via Rick Chan. Robek came through a mutual friend, Moon, who visited him in Austin. Artist intake was a Google form feeding a spreadsheet, with roughly 10–20 submissions.

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, 6th Anniversary Retrospective — asking an artist to remember Hunt’s own recruitment process (char 294,247):

“So, go back. How did you become a Curio card artist? Did you fill out a form? Did you get the inside track with Moon? I should probably know this, but I’m kind of asking you, because I’m not sure I recall.”

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, 6th Anniversary Retrospective (char 179,429) — a co-founder who has never met one of his seven artists:

“we come to the eclipse card and I don’t know Thoros of Mirror. I do want to find out”

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, AiN4 — the Bitcoiner-on-Ethereum joke:

“And what’s so funny is that these cards are on Ethereum and it’s clearly an Ethereum thing. But our first 10 like artist cards, wherever are all Bitcoin propaganda.”

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, AiN4 — on how small it all was:

“we had 5 or 10 people that were fans of us I think moon was there and he made a gallery for us”

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, AiN4 — a production quirk:

“Travis has his number on the other side because it wouldn’t work with the artwork otherwise”

Card 30, the eclipse card

[DOC] Contract 0x7F5B230Dc580d1e67DF6eD30dEe82684dD113D1F, token Curio30/CRO30, decimals 0, totalSupply = 821. Created 23 August 2017 07:15:26 UTC, block 4193345. Artist: Thoros of Myr, anonymous. Title: Eclipse.

[DOC] docs.curio.cards FAQ: “Card 30’s supply of 821 Cards is because of the day of the solar eclipse, 8/21, in 2017.” Christie’s lot essay: “So-named for its release coinciding with an eclipse on August 21, 2017, there were also 821 (8/21) editions minted.”

But the contract went up on 23 August — two days AFTER the eclipse. “Released to coincide with” (Christie’s) and “released on that day” are both wrong on the chain. The supply commemorates the date; the deployment does not land on it.

An error in the project’s own docs, to avoid repeating: the Thoros of Myr page says “Thoros’ Card 30 celebrates the Great American Eclipse of September 21, 2017. It was released on that day, too” — both halves wrong.

Three numbers circulate: 821, 816, 826.

• 821 — the minted supply. On chain, plus the docs FAQ and Christie’s. Solid.
• 816 — what both curio.cards and docs display as “Supply”. The curio.cards page contradicts itself in a single paragraph: “Supply x816” sits directly above a sentence saying 821 were created. Travis Uhrig’s hedged “I believe some of them were locked” is the only attempted explanation. Treat as 821 minted, 816 displayed, 5 unaccounted for — and say so.
• 826 — an error, and its provenance is in this archive. It comes from Hunt misremembering the eclipse date on air, three times: AiN6, 7 June 2021 (“there’s only 826 of them made and that’s because it was 826 2017 which was the day of the eclipse”), the Rediscovery Party, 15 July 2021, and a replay in the 6th Anniversary Retrospective. An earlier wobble shows him unsure, 4th Anniversary, 10 May 2021: “I think it was like 827 or 821 and it was that was the month in the day.” 826 appears in no web source found. The eclipse was 21 August 2017 and the contract holds 821. The book can retire 826 — and the provenance of the error is itself a good detail.

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, 4th Anniversary — the abandoned version of card 30:

“originally the idea actually was let’s like see if we can just time lapse photograph the eclipse and make that a card”

Dropped because it needed special equipment.

PART 8 — WHERE THE RECORD AND THE MEMORY DIVERGE

Fourteen documented divergences, numbered C1–C14. In each case the book presents both. Further disagreements confined to a single figure — the supply columns in Part 9, the four set-count numbers in 6.3, the three irreconcilable collection totals, the card 30 eclipse date — are recorded where they arise rather than repeated here.

C1 — Who founded what. Nine sources, nine framings. The earliest document, the 9 May 2017 Bitcointalk post, lists under “Who is Behind Curio Cards?”: Rhett Creighton → Inventor of Curio Cards, protocol developer and researcher; Thomas Hunt → Founder of MadBitcoins, World Crypto Network, The Bitcoin Group; Travis Uhrig → SF Bitcoin Meetup Organizer. Bitcoin.com, June 2017, calls Hunt “founder and CEO” and does not mention the other two. The 2017 website’s own commented-out, never-rendered team block says Travis Uhrig CEO, Rhett Creighton CTO, Kym Donovan COO — and omits Hunt entirely. Castor and Gerard exclude Creighton from “the initial founders” while calling him “Curio founder” twice elsewhere in the same piece. docs.curio.cards now lists all three as co-founder.

Two names in official sources appear in no press and were not run down: “Michael C.” (credited in the official repo README as contributing to the contract) and “Kym Donovan, COO” (2017 site source). Leads, not facts.

C2 — Which cards were defective. Travis Uhrig gives three accounts: “17 wasn’t the only one that was deployed twice” (2023); “it was 18 and 19 … 17 was the one that was not messed up” (2024); “Actually 1718 and 19 were all double-manated, but only 17 was valuable” (2023). Converging on all three double-deployed, only 17’s second vending machine functional. The 2024 version explicitly disclaims the “fork card forked” poetry — use it.

C3 — Did Hunt know about 17b in 2017? Hunt: “I think ret told me something like I was late night I screwed up the contract I had to do it twice”. Travis: “there’s no 17 B what is that you’re getting scam.” Unresolved.

C4 — Card 30’s supply. 821 (on chain, docs FAQ, Christie’s) vs 816 (curio.cards and docs card pages) vs 826 (Hunt, spoken, three times — an error).

C5 — The Christie’s total. Live on air: “the final USD was one million, uh, 35,000 dollars.” Hunt in 2025: “sold for 393 Ethereum worth 1.2 million sixty seven thousand three hundred and twenty dollars.” Not a contradiction — hammer versus total with premium. Do not let them collide in the text.

C6 — The mascot. Hunt describes commissioning the Fiverr raccoon as the mascot. Travis appears to say the Fiverr one was not the first mascot. The transcript is badly garbled. Flag rather than resolve.

C7 — Who briefed the infinity-symbol mask. Hunt: “I described I wanted the masks to look like an eight.” Travis: “He has that infinity symbol around his eyes, just as I suggested and described.” Both agree the raccoon was Hunt’s. Genuinely unresolved.

C8 — Who came up with the name. Hunt credits Travis twice. Travis never claims it — he describes a group thesaurus session at Rhett’s: “the very first time CurioCards has ever written down anywhere as a phrase was on the whiteboard on his wall … we were throwing around collectible words and alliteration”. Travis’s own account is more communal than Hunt’s attribution.

C9 — Who found the vending machines. Travis credits Dyaping first, twice, with Harry BTC alongside. Hunt credits Harry BTC. The documented record (Castor and Gerard) says @DieAping found them on GitHub and @HarryBTC published the tutorial that drained them — which reconciles both, and suggests they are describing different acts.

C10 — What split the community. Hunt: “this battle over the misprint led to the kind of splintering of the community”. Robek, replying: “Like I think that it was a little bit more than just the 17b thing. I don’t think that was really ultimately the issue. I think it was more just like a transparency thing.” A polite on-mic correction of a founder by an artist.

C11 — The mint target for cards 1–10. 100,000 each (Hunt 2024, Travis 2023, and the chain) versus Hunt’s 2023 “we’d started it like 200,000”, which is internally incoherent. 100,000 is the consistent figure.

C12 — Robek’s card supplies. Hunt guesses “300, 200, 100”. Travis corrects him in real time, reading the official page: “I’m on the website right now… while there’s 522, there’s only 250 of the 23s”. On chain: 500 / 500 / 250. A clean demonstration that Hunt’s supply numbers should not be used without checking.

C13 — Marisol Vengas. Pseudonym of Max Infeld (docs, and Infeld himself) versus Christie’s “anonymous artist collective”. See Part 7.

C14 — Card 20’s artist. Card 20, MadBitcoins, is Phneep’s — Hunt says so twice (“Mad Bitt Coins head on James Bond’s body”). But cards 20 and 21 are two Mad Bitcoins cards by two different artists, adjacent, and Hunt jokes “I’m card number 20… Card number 20 and 21”. Flagged as the single most likely place for the book to make an error.

Speakers admitting uncertainty about their own history

The passages most valuable for a book that wants to be honest about its own sourcing. All from the 6th and 7th anniversary retrospectives unless noted.

[OTHER] Travis Uhrig, on the first-art claim: “I never felt comfortable saying that before the first because, you know, you never know”

[OTHER] Travis Uhrig, on 17B before he believed in it: “And I’m like, there’s no 17B. What is that? You’re getting scammed.”

[OTHER] Travis Uhrig, on what went wrong, stated as a guess: “My first guess was we used the wrong IPFS hash.”

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, on the double deployment: “whether he just pushed send twice, or I guess we’ll never really know.”

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, twice hedging in one breath: “But I think Rhett made a mistake on it. I think Rhett told me something like…”

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, on the first animated NFT: “maybe it’s the first animated NFT. I don’t know.”

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, on Marisol Vengas’s method: “And I don’t know how the Marisol Vengue’s collective did the art”

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, on the whale, still: “we still don’t know this is still a mystery to us a true true mystery” — having wrongly suspected Rick Chan for years.

[OTHER] Robek, on a second whale: “There’s another whale and I don’t know who that is.”

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, on his own collection: “I’m pretty sure my collection is incomplete because I don’t have a 26”

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, on the most consequential technical property of Curio Cards — and none of the founders know why it exists: “But for whatever reason when he sat down to program it, he didn’t include version numbers”

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, reconstructing his own project from the chain: “There was a vote that I saw later on, I’ve looked around recently and it looks like they burnt an Ethereum to have a vote”

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, on the number of artists: “I think there’s about seven.” And on the Google form: “I’m pretty sure I made it”

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, on card ordering: “I make a mistake and I put clay before paint”

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, on the cryptograffiti parodies: “It’s a parody of one of those British banks. I forget which one. … And 13 BTC, which I think is the city bank.”

[TH-LATER] Thomas Hunt, on the Christie’s buyer: “a mess his name, Taylor Garing, I think, I’m pretty close”

[OTHER] Max Infeld, on his own submission count, contradicting himself in one breath: “I think I submitted five in total” and “how many pieces, 25, 25 or so artworks I submitted”

[OTHER] Travis Uhrig, volunteering a first-claim and downgrading it in the same sentence: “I think we’re actually, essentially the first to build a report might get the walled as well, but that’s a little bit less cloud on that particular claim” — ASR: “forked MyEtherWallet”; “less cloud” = less clout.

PART 9 — THE CARD TABLE

Titles and artists from docs.curio.cards. Supply columns deliberately kept separate, because they disagree — curio.cards figures read as sold/released counts; Christie’s read as on-chain totalSupply for cards 14 and up, and as something undocumented for 1–13.

A clean, checkable structural finding. For cards 14–30 and 17b, Christie’s figures match on-chain totalSupply exactly in all 17 cases. For cards 1–13, on-chain totalSupply is a flat 100000 — the warehouse design — and Christie’s numbers match neither source; for cards 1, 3 and 4 Christie’s is lower than curio.cards, so Christie’s is not reporting minted supply there either.

Three published totals, none reconciled: curio.cards 1–30 = 28,688 (+17b = 29,185). Christie’s 1–30 = 29,296 (+17b = 29,796), internally consistent with its own “almost 30,000”. docs.curio.cards says 29,700. Castor and Gerard say 29,700. Live discrepancy to check: nft now gives 222 for both cards 24 and 25, conflicting with the 333/222/111 sequence.

PART 10 — WHAT COULD NOT BE ESTABLISHED

Fifteen honest gaps, so nobody has to guess twice.

1. No 2017 page states the launch date. The 9 May 2017 date rests on the chain, the Bitcointalk timestamp, the Reddit timestamp and a robots.txt capture — not on the site’s own copy.
2. All mycuriocards.com sub-pages are absent from the Wayback Machine (about, gallery, trade, earn, artist pages). The 2017 FAQ and team copy are not recoverable that way.
3. “Mother.Tech” as a parent company is undocumented. What is documented: /a/mother.tech/ in the launch-day Google Form URL, and “Mothership Inc.” in the site footer. “Mothership Technology” appears only in an unverified Crunchbase bio. Pull the California Secretary of State record before printing any entity claim.
4. The 5-card gap between 821 and 816 on card 30 has no documented explanation. Travis Uhrig’s hedged “some of them were locked” is the only attempt.
5. Whether the EIP-721 Curio sentence was in Dieter Shirley’s original 22 September 2017 issue body. The post was edited, GitHub exposes no body-edit history, the earliest Wayback capture is 7 December 2017. Use the 9 November 2017 floor.
6. The exact date Larva Labs softened its claim. Bracketed to 31 March – 31 October 2021 only (an August capture attempt hit HTTP 429).
7. Etheria’s DEVCON1 demo. Rests entirely on Etheria’s own FAQ; no Ethereum Foundation source found.
8. The Sotheby’s price. Lot page dead, archived snapshot an empty SPA shell. An unattributed “more than 100 ETH ($260,000)” could not be traced and must not be printed.
9. The exact card-26 locked count. 5 (Uhrig, CoinDesk) versus 6 implied (Castor and Gerard). Settle with balanceOf(lockedWrapper) on 0x1cB5BF4Be53eb141B56f7E4Bb36345a353B5488c.
10. Who actually wrote the official wrapper, and who audited it. No official source names anyone; docs name Moon as “official curio wrapper solidity developer” without saying he wrote this one.
11. The text of four pivotal tweets. @DieAping’s original find (account deleted); Harry BTC’s 14 March 2021 tutorial (1370969955349491713); McBride’s 15 March 2021 thread (1371226231140671489); Taylor Gerring’s self-identification (1444300130316963843). Existence and dates documented; contents unread. Do not quote their contents.
12. Four paywalled or blocked sources that matter. Quartz (the source Wikipedia’s founder sentence rests on); CoinDesk 17 September 2021 (timed out, though its quotes are recoverable via secondary citation); ARTnews (TollBit paywall — unresolved, not an absence); and Robert Alice, On NFTs, TASCHEN rev. ed., pp. 46–47 — Wikipedia’s only book citation and probably the most citable print source. Not obtained.
13. No 2017 r/ethereum or r/ethtrader post found — but reddit.com is wholly unreachable to this tooling and Wayback’s 2017 Reddit coverage is sparse. Not evidence of absence. A Pushshift or Arctic-Shift dump would settle it.

14. A second, separate 2017 incident Travis Uhrig describes — a card deployed with the wrong IPFS hash that never went on sale — is documented nowhere but that transcript. Worth chasing.

15. Two screenshot leads from the quiet years, found 1 October 2026 — not quotable as they stand. brain.db holds Twitter screenshots (source screenshot, OCR’d, no tweet IDs, truncated mid-sentence) which appear to contain:

    • A June 2018 reply by a named technologist asserting that CryptoPunks and CurioCards were first, “though they differ in technical implementation since launched before 721 standard” — item scr-ce3feae3481b37b7. If retrieved from the live tweet, this would be the earliest third-party priority claim in the corpus, predating the rediscovery by nearly three years.
    • A July 2018 reply from an artist thanking Hunt and referring to “the one that won on Curiocards” — item scr-ce3feae3481b37b7, same capture. Would corroborate the April 2018 community vote from the artists’ side.
    • Both are OCR of photographs of a screen. Neither is a retrievable verbatim source, so neither is quoted or attributed by name anywhere in the book. Settle by finding the original tweets; the handles are legible in the OCR.

Also: the 6th Anniversary Retrospective transcript is truncated mid-sentence at character 686,314, cutting off Hunt describing Robek’s fan art. If the original at ~/brain/transcripts/th-archive/WCN/live/WCN_20230510_Erc7dTLjGhg.txt is longer, the tail is worth recovering.

Quote bank compiled 1 October 2026 from 5,000 Curio-Cards-matching items in brain.db, 31 episode transcripts, and external research. Every transcript quote verified by exact substring match against its source file before inclusion.