Sources

Split by kind, because the kinds are not equivalent. The chain settles what it can settle; a 2017 web capture is evidence of what a page said on a day; a 2021 interview is testimony; and an auction catalogue is a sales document written by a party with an interest in the claim it makes.

Compiled 1 October 2026. Every quotation drawn from a show transcript was verified by exact substring match against its source file before use. What could not be established is listed separately in Part 10 of the quote bank, and is not padded out here into the appearance of a source.

1. Primary — the chain

The best witness in the story, and the only one that does not misremember. It records deployment order, supplies, addresses and call data. It cannot say whether something is art, whether a project “counts”, or who a wallet belongs to.

Curio Cards, 2017 originals. All thirty-one contract addresses are in apparatus/THE-CARDS.md. Key timestamps used in the book:

The comparison set, for chapter fourteen. Terra Nullius 0x6e38A457C722C6011B2dfa06d49240e797844d66 (7 Aug 2015); Etheria v0.9 0xe468d26721b703d224d05563cb64746a7a40e1f4 (19 Oct 2015), v1.1 0x169332Ae7D143E4B5c6baEdb2FEF77BFBdDB4011 (29 Oct 2015), v1.2 0xb21f8684f23dbb1008508b4de91a0aaedebdb7e4 (1 Nov 2015 UTC); PixelMap 0x015a06a433353f8db634df4eddf0c109882a15ab (17 Nov 2016); CryptoPunks V1 0x6Ba6f2207e343923BA692e5Cae646Fb0F566DB8D (9 Jun 2017), V2 0xb47e3cd837dDF8e4c57F05d70Ab865de6e193BBB (22 Jun 2017).

Tools used. Blockscout API (https://eth.blockscout.com/api/v2/) for independent re-verification of the launch transaction, 1 October 2026. Ethplorer (https://api.ethplorer.io/getTokenInfo/) for token metadata. CCSupply (https://ccsupply.xyz/) publishes a Card_Supply_Verbose.csv that treats the faulty wrapper as a burn address — the quickest way to settle the locked-card counts, and not yet used to do so.

2. Primary — 2017 and 2018 documents

Contemporaneous, and therefore better evidence of what was believed at the time than any recollection.

• Bitcointalk launch announcement, 9 May 2017 — https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1909450.0. Carries the “Who is Behind Curio Cards?” credits, the ERC20-compliant / Supply: 100,000 Limited / Divisibility: 0 decimal places spec line, and the artist-application Google Form under /a/mother.tech/. The comment thread preserves the contemporaneous scepticism.
• Bitcointalk burn announcement, 16 May 2017 21:45 — https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1920851.0. “Curio Cards 4-6 now available! Massive burn destroys Curio Cards 1-3 Warehouse!”, written in the raccoon’s voice, citing the zero address balance of 97,846 on card 1.
• mycuriocards.com, Wayback captures — notably 20 July 2017 (the “All proceeds… go directly to the artist” lines, “Every Tuesday!”, the © Copyright 2017 | Mothership Inc. footer) and 18 January 2018 (the redesign naming six artists, and the FAQ mission statement).
• buycuriocards.com, captured 18 August 2017 — a Blogger site, not a bespoke build. Post “How to Buy Curio Cards”, published 2017-07-08T12:10:00-07:00, with the send 0.0025 ETH for 1 pricing ladder and the “New Card Tuesday!” countdown. Its sidebar “cards left” figures are hand-typed static text, byte-identical across the August 2017 and February 2018 captures, and are not inventory.
• The 2017 site source — https://raw.githubusercontent.com/curiocards/curiocards.github.io/master/index.html, and independently in Wayback capture 20180118232205. Contains the commented-out, never-rendered “The team” block naming Uhrig CEO, Creighton CTO and Kym Donovan COO, with Hunt absent. An adjacent commented-out advisors block still holds template placeholders, which is why the whole thing was probably never published.
• The project repository README — https://raw.githubusercontent.com/curiocards/vintage.curio.cards/master/README.md, which credits “Michael C.” as a contract contributor.

Gap: all mycuriocards.com sub-pages (about, gallery, trade, earn, artist pages) are absent from the Wayback Machine, so the 2017 FAQ and team copy are not recoverable that way. And no 2017 page states the launch date — the 9 May date rests on the chain, the Bitcointalk and Reddit timestamps, and a robots.txt capture.

3. The standard

Load-bearing for chapter ten, and the only part of the book where a primary source was re-fetched byte-for-byte during the writing.

• EIP-721 / ERC-721, final text — https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ethereum/ERCs/master/ERCS/erc-721.md, rendered at https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-721. Front matter: status: Final, created: 2018-01-24, authors William Entriken, Dieter Shirley, Jacob Evans, Nastassia Sachs. Re-fetched and verified 1 October 2026: the Backwards Compatibility note naming Curio Cards is present byte-exact, immediately after the three-item “Example NFT implementations as of February 2018” list.
• Dieter Shirley’s first complete draft — https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/721#issuecomment-343246872, created 9 November 2017 18:28:25 UTC, updated_at identical to created_at, i.e. never edited. This is where the Curio Cards sentence originates.
• First EIP commit containing it — https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/commit/31ed49ea42bca57407395dd6ddaadbaaf38ac461, 24 January 2018, author William Entriken, message EIP-721 Deed Standard. Sentence unchanged since 6 March 2018; standard Final 22 June 2018.
• The full issue thread, 398 comments, retrieved and searched: nine match “curio”, eight of which are “curious” / “Curiously”. One genuine mention in the whole standards process.
• ERC-1155 — searched; contains no mention of Curio Cards, contradicting the project’s documentation.

4. Project sources

Useful, detailed, and not independent. Where these conflict with a primary document, the book says so.

• docs.curio.cards — the authoritative artist mapping (also machine-readable at https://docs.curio.cards/llms.txt), the card pages, the FAQ, the wrapping explanation, the team page naming Moon and Kian Bradley, and the artwork-licensing page. Source of the “maximum potential supply” / “active supply” / “zombie wallets” distinction.
• curio.cards — the public card pages and their displayed supply figures, including the card 30 page that contradicts itself within a single paragraph.
• Curio DAO on Medium (https://medium.com/@curiocards) — the founders series (part 1, 10 June 2023, which uses the word “bankrupt”), and “A Very Curio 2021” (14 January 2022), source of the $120 million OpenSea volume figure, the 4,800 holder count, the Sotheby’s confirmation, the Taylor Gerring attribution, the 107 ETH previous-full-set comparator, and the Cryptopop Art Guild.
• Curio governance — https://governance.curio.cards/#/proposal/QmU61U2bux8io9VrVKGd9pmSfn7v5WDQ1o9EooSGe3qYhu, the 1% royalty proposal.

Three project claims this book corrects: that ERC-1155 references Curio Cards (it does not); that card 30 was released on the day of the eclipse (it was two days later, and the docs also give the wrong month); and the Taschen/NFT Yearbook inclusions, of which Taschen is confirmed and the NFT Yearbook is not substantiated by any source.

5. Journalism and published writing

Graded by hedge in Part 4.4 of the quote bank, because how carefully each outlet worded the priority claim is itself a finding.

• Jamie Redman, Bitcoin.com, 4 June 2017 — https://news.bitcoin.com/blockchain-collectibles-curio-cards/. The earliest substantial press. Calls Hunt “founder and CEO” and does not mention Uhrig or Creighton.
• OrangutanCapital, Medium, bylined 15 March 2021 (metadata shows a later revision, 5 August 2021 — both cited) — https://orangutancapital.medium.com/what-are-curio-cards-the-nfts-older-than-mooncats-and-cryptopunks-702244535f19. The best contemporaneous account of the rediscovery and the faulty wrapper, written days after both, with the author’s own loss disclosed.
• Adam McBride, Medium — https://adamamcbride.medium.com/2017-nft-art-project-is-burning-your-nft-..., 9 May 2021. Finding: McBride never published a Medium article about Curio Cards. His complete sitemap — 19 posts — contains none. His Curio output was a Twitter thread, podcasts and interviews.
• Tracy Wang, CoinDesk, 17 September 2021 — the pre-sale piece. Source of Noah Davis’s quotes, Travis Uhrig’s published 17b account, and Uhrig’s “There are only 111 of them. Five have been lost.” (Direct fetch timed out; quotes recovered via secondary citation.)
• Helen Holmes, Observer, 21 September 2021 — https://observer.com/2021/09/christies-is-now-accepting-ether-.... Headline says “Earliest”; never uses “art”.
• Artnet News, 21 September 2021 (staff) and Eileen Kinsella, 4 October 2021 — https://news.artnet.com/market/christies-eclectic-post-war-present-auction-results-2016660. The 4 October piece states its own convention (final prices include fees, estimates do not) and is the source for 393 ETH as price realised.
• Scott Nover, Quartz, 1 October 2021 — https://qz.com/2067917/.... The source Wikipedia’s founder sentence rests on. Body gated; not read.
• Frank Chaparro, The Block, 29 September 2021 — makes no priority claim at all. A useful negative data point.
• CNBC, 1 October 2021 — near-verbatim lift of CoinDesk’s formulation; cited in turn by Wikipedia.
• Amy Castor and David Gerard, 4 June 2022 — https://amycastor.com/2022/06/04/the-early-history-of-nfts-curio-cards/, and the CryptoPunks instalment, 16 June 2022 — https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2022/06/16/.... The most rigorous journalism on the subject: the only published source to state the Etheria exception in the same breath as the Curio claim, and the source for @DieAping, “permawrapped”, the XCOPY near-miss and the Gerring attribution. Also the piece that demotes Creighton from “the initial founders” while calling him “Curio founder” twice elsewhere in itself.
• Luke Whyte, SuperRare editorial — https://superrare.com/curation/editorial/11865. Source of McBride’s MoonCats/Curio/Etheria sequence and his “NFT archeologist” self-description. On-page date of 15 April 2025 is a CMS artefact; internal evidence places publication around August–September 2021.
• Matt Medved, nft now, 11 March 2024 — https://nftnow.com/art/bargain-vs-blue-chip-curio-cards/. The 2024 correction that cards 24 and 25, not card 26, are the binding constraint, and that complete sets cap at 33. Discloses that the author holds twelve Curio Cards. Gives 222 for both cards 24 and 25, which conflicts with every other source.
• Christie’s, lot 6337619, sale 29238, 1 October 2021 — https://www.christies.com/lot/lot-6337619. The lot essay, the card-by-card figures, and the broadest unhedged priority claim in the record. Its estimate line as currently rendered is a currency-toggle artefact and must not be cited.
• Sotheby’s Metaverse, Natively Digital 1.2: The Collectors, 14–21 October 2021 — https://metaverse.sothebys.com/natively-digital/lots/curio-cards-complete-set-1-30-plus-17b. Existence corroborated by three Wayback captures; the live page now redirects and the snapshots are an empty JavaScript shell, so the price is not established.
• TopDog Studios, the Non-Fungible Vault. Two pages, both re-fetched and verified 1 October 2026: the announcement at https://topdogbeachclub.com/blog/introducing-the-top-dog-non-fungible-vault/ (2 December 2021) and the programme page at https://topdogbeachclub.com/non-fungible-vault/, which carries the COHORT ONE partner list naming Curio Cards and the silver-halide mechanism sentence. Both still describe the first deposit in the future tense.
• Arctic World Archive, 16 March 2022 — https://arcticworldarchive.org/blog/digital-art-and-nfts-deposited-for-eternity-in-the-arctic-world-archive/. Confirms the deposit, dates the ceremony to 17 March 2022 in Longyearbyen, attributes the “45,000 years / 45 days” line to Paul Price, founder and managing director of TopDog Studios, and quotes Rune Bjerkestrand, Managing Director of Piql. Gives “over 70,000 unique pieces of art” and names no individual collection, including Curio Cards. This is not the GitHub Arctic Code Vault, a separate programme depositing a bulk code snapshot into the same facility.
• Robert Alice, On NFTs, TASCHEN, revised ed., 22 October 2025, pp. 46–47, ISBN 978-3836593458. Wikipedia’s reference 1. Spread photographed in a project tweet of 7 March 2024. The book was not obtained, so nothing in it is quoted.
• Etheria — https://www.etheria.world/faq.html (the 2021 priority claim) and https://www.etheria.world/whatis.html (the project’s own 2015 copy, flagged as such on the page, claiming to be the first virtual world rather than the first NFT). Both live on the same site.
• Larva Labs — larvalabs.com/cryptopunks via Wayback: 1 June 2018 (no first-NFT claim), 31 March 2021 (“the first”), 31 October 2021 (“one of the earliest”), live site 30 September 2026 (softened wording retained).
• Guinness World Records, record 15-696336 — Quantum, Kevin McCoy. Gives “05 May 2014” where most press says 3 May 2014; both reported, unresolved. Also records Anil Dash’s disavowal.
• Wikipedia — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curio_Cards and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-fungible_token, both read 30 September 2026. Three non-identical formulations of the claim; the most technically accurate one (“using the fungible standard”) is unsourced editorial work appearing in neither cited source.

6. Thomas Hunt’s own archive

The distinctive material, and the reason this book exists. None of it has been published before.

• ~/brain/brain.db — a SQLite knowledge base holding, among much else, roughly 91,000 of Hunt’s tweets from 2013 onward. A direct scan returned 7,683 rows matching “curio”, filtered to 5,000 genuine Curio Cards items after excluding curious / curiosity. Full extraction at ~/brain/_research/curio_book/all_full.jsonl.
• Tweet dates. created_at in brain.db is the ingest date, not the post date. Every tweet date in this book was recovered from the Twitter snowflake ID, which encodes a millisecond timestamp, so each is independently verifiable from the ID alone.
• The episode transcripts — roughly 2,800 files across Mad Bitcoins, World Crypto Network, The Bitcoin Group and related shows. A keyword sweep matched 2,252 files; 31 priority episodes were extracted in full (about 3.2 MB) and read end to end. They live at ~/brain/_research/curio_book/episodes/, each with a header giving title, date, show code, episode ID, brain item ID and the original transcript path.

The single most valuable item in the entire corpus is episodes/2017-07-21_MB_Robek_CurioCardArtist.txt — Mad Bitcoins, episode MB_20170721_WGUBtwIEk_c, video https://youtu.be/WGUBtwIEk_c. Two voices only, so attribution is tractable; recorded 20 July 2017, two days after the project’s only sell-out. Chapter six is built on it.

The transcripts are Whisper output with no speaker labels and real errors. The error glossary is in the quote bank’s front matter. Every spoken quote in this book carries its episode and date so the audio can be checked; speaker attribution is stated with a confidence level; nothing is silently corrected.

Two screenshot items are deliberately not used. brain.db holds OCR’d photographs of Twitter from 2018 which appear to contain an early third-party priority claim and a corroboration of the April 2018 community vote. OCR of a photograph of a screen is not a retrievable verbatim source, so neither is quoted or attributed by name anywhere in the book. Both are recorded as leads in Part 10 of the quote bank.

Not used as a source at all: the 1n2.org wiki. It is nightly AI-generated from these same transcripts, so citing it would be circular. It was also wrong in several places — the Phneep and cryptograffiti card ranges, the swap of cards 18 and 19, the attribution of Curio’s Svalbard preservation to the GitHub Arctic Code Vault, “Card #21 (Mad Bitcoins)” where card 20 is MadBitcoins, the CryptoPunks launch date, the card 26 figures, and an unverified quotation attributed to Adam McBride. All of those were corrected on 1 October 2026, and the nightly generator prompt that seeded them was hardened so they do not regenerate. The circularity objection stands regardless: the wiki is downstream of this same archive, so it remains outside this book’s source set.

7. What is missing, and why

Fifteen things could not be established and are listed in Part 10 of the quote bank rather than hidden. The four that most affect the book:

1. The contents of four pivotal tweets — @DieAping’s original find (account deleted), Harry BTC’s 14 March 2021 tutorial, Adam McBride’s 15 March 2021 thread, and Taylor Gerring’s self-identification. Existence and dates are documented by third-party citation; the text of none of them was read, so none is quoted or characterised.
2. The Sotheby’s price.
3. Whether the Curio Cards sentence was in Dieter Shirley’s original 22 September 2017 issue body. The post was edited and GitHub exposes no body-edit history. The book uses the 9 November 2017 floor.
4. Any incorporation record for the entity. “Mother.Tech” and “Mothership Inc.” are documented as a Google Workspace domain and a website footer respectively. No California Secretary of State record has been pulled, so the book says only what those two artefacts say.

Compiled 1 October 2026. Where a source conflicts with another, both appear in the book with their dates, and the book says which is better evidenced and why. Where neither is, it says that instead.