A 1n2.org investigation · Thomas Hunt's nine-year NFT arc · three chains, two OpenSea profiles, eight verified collections
The Mad Bitcoins NFT arc: 2017 →2026.
Thomas Hunt co-created Curio Cards in May 2017 — the first art NFTs on Ethereum, three months before CryptoPunks. The cards lay dormant for four years, were rediscovered in March 2021, wrapped to the ERC-1155 standard, and auctioned at Christie's in October 2021 for $1.2M. Between rediscovery and now, Thomas minted 171 NFTs across 11 templates on the WAX chain (under the wallet cekb4.wam), founded an OpenSea umbrella called Mad Factory that spawned four 1/1 collections in September 2022 — CurioXMidJourney, Mad Rabbitz, Curio Samurai, and a later CurioXGreer Andy drop — and maintained a second OpenSea profile at opensea.io/MadBitcoins from the 2021 NFT-boom era. The original 30-card series, meanwhile, has spawned a Curio derivative ecosystem documented here for the first time in one place: community remixes (CurioXKingDingus, CurioXMrBlack, CurioApples), a sequel project (Curio Cards Plus), and the wrapped originals (My Curio Cards, the highest-selling 2017 art collection on OpenSea). This is the single linkable index of the entire arc.
This report is the single linkable index of Thomas Hunt's NFT work, 2017 through 2026. It does not duplicate the deep essays at /madart/essays/mad-factory.html, /madart/essays/curio-x-midjourney.html, or /madart/essays/curio-to-mad-factory.html — those go deep on the art-historical reading of each Mad Factory project. This report does the marketplace-by-marketplace, contract-by-contract ledger: every collection, every chain, every wallet, every verifiable mint count.
The arc has three eras. First, Curio Cards 2017 — the foundational artifact, co-created with Travis Uhrig (contracts) and Rhett Creighton (artist coordination). 30 cards, 7 artists, hybrid ERC-20 contracts that predate ERC-721, dormant 2017–2021, rediscovered, wrapped to ERC-1155 as My Curio Cards, auctioned at Christie's October 2021 for $1.2M. Currently 21,346 wrapped tokens circulating. opensea.io/MyCurioCards is the rediscovery-team account (joined 2021-08-13).
Second, WAX / AtomicHub, May–June 2021 — Thomas's own first NFTs as a creator. Wallet cekb4.wam. Collection madbitcoins1 ("Mad Bitcoins 2021 NFT Collection"), created March 29, 2021. Three schemas: madbitcoins, membership (111 Collector's Club cards), nftadventure (NFTs tied to the WCN show Adventures in #NFTs — 8 unique templates, 5 editions each, ~40 live after 10 burns). Total: 171 assets, 11 templates, 10 burned, market_fee 10%. This is the only chain where Thomas's own NFTs live alongside Garbage Pail Kids, BroPunks, and other 2021 WAX-era pickups in his profile inventory.
Third, OpenSea / Ethereum, August 2021 → September 2022 — Thomas crosses to Ethereum. Two distinct OpenSea profiles emerge. opensea.io/MadBitcoins (wallet 0x4d97…8f08, joined 2021-09-05) is the personal account, used for promoting Curio Cards through the bull run; bio reads "Spreading the word about #Bitcoin since 2013."opensea.io/MadFactory (wallet 0x5fd2…8c73, profile dated 2025-09-09 but minting since 2022) is the creator umbrella; bio reads "Mad Factory NFTs is a collection of unique digital artworks created by Thomas Hunt (Curio Cards)." Under Mad Factory, four collections were launched on September 27, 2022 and October 26, 2022:
CurioXMidJourney — 30 1/1 NFTs, MidJourney remixes of the original Curio Card set. Mad Rabbitz — 12 1/1 NFTs, "Created by MadBitcoins X MidJourney." Curio Samurai — 12 1/1 NFTs, "MadBitcoins X MidJourney." CurioXGreer Andy — 20 NFTs, Greer Andy's first NFT drop (proceeds direct to artist). The four Mad Factory drops account for 74 1/1 Ethereum NFTs in total supply — every count verified against OpenSea's CollectionStats.totalSupply field on May 18, 2026.[1]
Beyond Mad Factory, the Curio rediscovery spawned a derivative ecosystem that Thomas helped seed and promote. Community Curio remixes verified on OpenSea: CurioXKingDingus (38 supply, commissioned by Marisol Vengas), CurioXMrBlack (23 supply, commissioned by Marisol Vengas), CurioApples (141 supply, Feb 2022 — Thomas and Marisol's direct Phneep tribute, one apple per W3 named CSS color), and the sequel project CurioPlusOrg Collection 1 (94,140 supply — a mass-mint sequel to the original 30, dropped October 7, 2021 via a Clubhouse drop party). Plus Curio Wiki (the 68-article encyclopedia) and Curio Quant (the AI card market intelligence dashboard) — Thomas's own analytical and editorial layer on top of the on-chain data.
The throughline: Thomas was first on Ethereum (May 2017) and last to claim credit. The 2017 cards were forgotten until 2021. The 2021 rediscovery birthed the wrapper, the Christie's auction, and a parallel WAX experiment. The 2022 Mad Factory drops were Thomas-as-MidJourney-prompt-engineer remixing his own founding artifact. Nine years, three chains, two OpenSea profiles, eight verified collections — and a body of work that is, by accident of being early, foundational.
30
Curio Cards in the original 2017 set
21,346
Wrapped Curio Cards on OpenSea slug: curiocardswrapper
171
WAX NFT assets minted by cekb4.wam 10 burned, 161 live
11
WAX templates in madbitcoins1 collection
74
Mad Factory 1/1 NFTs on OpenSea 30+12+12+20 across 4 collections
8
Verified collections in the arc
2
OpenSea profiles MadBitcoins · MadFactory
9 yr
Arc length: May 2017 → May 2026
Section I · The foundation
Curio Cards, May 2017 — the first art NFTs on Ethereum.
THE ORIGINAL 30 — REPRESENTATIVE SAMPLES
Three months before CryptoPunks. Four years before anyone realized what that meant. 30 cards. 7 artists. One small team. Hybrid ERC-20 contracts that pre-date the ERC-721 standard. The story is told in long-form at the Curio Cards story; this section is the structural facts.
Thomas Hunt brought the host's network — Mad Bitcoins, WCN, the Bitcoin Group. The marketing instinct, the on-camera explainer, the connection to actual on-chain commerce.[2]Travis Uhrig wrote the smart contracts. The technical architecture predates the ERC-721 standard that became the canonical NFT contract; Curio Cards used a hybrid ERC-20 approach that was the best-available technique in early 2017. Rhett Creighton coordinated the artists. The 30-card initial set featured work by seven artists — Phneep, Cryptograffiti, Daniel Friedman, Robek World, Marisol Vengas, Thoros of Myr, and Cryptopop — and the curation was deliberate. These were the artists already shipping in the crypto world.
The honest answer: NFTs were not a thing yet. The word "NFT" wouldn't have a clear meaning for another year. CryptoPunks launched in June 2017, a month after Curio Cards; CryptoKitties (which broke the term into the mainstream) wasn't until November. The cards sold for $1–4 each, the sale didn't sell out, and the founders moved on.
In early 2021, NFT collectors started reverse-archaeology — what was actually the first? CryptoPunks claimed June 2017. A few people noticed that Curio Cards predated that by three months and that the contracts were still on-chain, still tradeable, with most of the supply locked in wallets that hadn't moved since launch. The technical problem: the original ERC-20-style contracts couldn't be listed on OpenSea. The solution was a wrapper contract that converted the originals to the modern ERC-1155 standard, enabling listing on OpenSea. The first rushed third-party wrapper had a fatal bug — tokens sent to it became permanently stuck ("permawrapped"), making Card #26 the rarest tradeable card with only 105–106 remaining in circulation.[3] The fixed wrapper (March 2021) became the canonical Curio Cards OpenSea presence: opensea.io/collection/curiocardswrapper, which OpenSea displays as "My Curio Cards 0.06 ETH", current totalSupply 21,346.[1]
A complete set of Curio Cards was auctioned at Christie's in October 2021. The price was reported at $1.2M. More importantly, the auction firmly seated Curio Cards in NFT history as a pre-Punks artifact. In OpenSea's own 2022 retrospective: "This year's 'Top Art Collection by Volume' goes to … @MyCurioCards 🎉"[4] — and the MyCurioCards account has since posted that the collection has done "over 41,300 ETH" in cumulative volume.[5]
The complete original Curio Cards set — May 9, 2017
The original 30 Curio Cards, wrapped to ERC-1155 in March 2021 to enable OpenSea listing. Display name on OpenSea: "My Curio Cards 0.06 ETH". Cumulative volume past 41,300 ETH. Curio Cards Bot posts every sale automatically.
The official rediscovery-team account on OpenSea. Bio is a literal markdown link: [Curio.Cards](https://Curio.Cards). This is the canonical home of the wrapped originals and the de facto Curio Cards brand on OpenSea in the post-2021 era.
@MyCurioCards — the rediscovery-team profileBecause the cards live on Ethereum, the project is also data. The 1n2 Curio properties — built by Thomas with his co-founder identity restored to public view — are the editorial and analytical surface area on top of the on-chain layer. Curio Wiki is the 68-article encyclopedia (artists, projects, shows, events). Curio Quant is the AI Card Market Intelligence dashboard — 180 collector profiles mined from 15,963 on-chain sales, 125 holders vs 55 flippers. Curio Prices tracks floor history. Curio Atlas visualizes the holder network. Curio Map shows distribution. Curio Charts is the live dashboard. All of it pulls from the same on-chain data, all of it lives on 1n2.org, all of it exists because somebody co-created the cards back in 2017 and then never quite stopped paying attention.
Section II · WAX / AtomicHub
cekb4.wam — the Mad Bitcoins 2021 NFT Collection.
THE WAX OUTPUT — MEMBERSHIP CARD + 7 OF THE GUEST PORTRAITS
A different chain. A different audience. The only NFTs Thomas has minted himself, as opposed to co-created or commissioned. All from May–June 2021, all tied to the WCN-era show Adventures in #NFTs.
The collection
Membership Card — 111 issued, schema 1Collection name: madbitcoins1. Display name: "Mad Bitcoins 2021 NFT Collection". Author wallet: cekb4.wam on the WAX blockchain. Created March 29, 2021 (block 111,092,957).[6] Market fee: 10%. Description, from the on-chain collection data: "New NFT creations from Thomas Hunt (Mad Bitcoins, World Crypto Network) & My Curio Cards (2017 NFTs)."
As of May 18, 2026: 171 assets minted, 10 burned (5 of Travis Uhrig #2, 5 of Daniel Friedman #3 — re-minted next day with corrected metadata), 161 live, 11 templates, 3 schemas. The schemas are:
One template, 111 issued Mad Bitcoins Collector's Club Membership Cards. Created May 9, 2021. Drops, giveaways, and direct sales filled the run between May 10 and May 24, 2021 — Thomas tweeted "Pretty soon it won't even fit on one page" on May 10. The Collector's Club had its first private LIVE meeting on May 17, 2021 (the WCN episode "Private Meeting — MadBitcoins NFT Collector's Club #LIVE").
Schema 2: nftadventure — guest portraits from Adventures in #NFTs
Adventures in #NFTs — the show-intro card (template 146043)Eight unique guest templates, 5 editions each. Created May 25–26, 2021 to launch the new WCN show Adventures in #NFTs. Two templates (Travis Uhrig #2, Daniel Friedman #3) were minted twice with corrected metadata, with the original 5 of each burned — net 40 live guest-interview NFTs across the 8 unique guests:
#0 Adventures in NFTs — the show-intro card (template 146043, 5 editions)
#1 Adam McBride — NFT archaeologist (template 146044, 5 editions)
Robek Interview — Curio artist Robek (cards 21-23)The original schema, predating both membership and nftadventure. Asset count by subtraction: 10 assets (171 total – 111 membership – 50 nftadventure). These pre-date the Collector's Club and the show launch — Thomas's first experimental WAX mints.
The full Thomas-Hunt-as-creator output on the WAX chain. Membership cards, show-tied guest portraits, plus a handful of pre-show experimental mints. Verified via the public AtomicAssets API.
Finally an #NFT show that has it's own #NFTs! ♾♾♾
— Thomas Hunt, May 27, 2021 · launch of Adventures in #NFTs
Section III · Two profiles, one creator
opensea.io/MadBitcoins and opensea.io/MadFactory.
THE TWO THOMAS PROFILES + THE REDISCOVERY-TEAM PROFILE
Thomas runs two distinct OpenSea profiles, on two distinct Ethereum wallets, that play two distinct roles. MadBitcoins is the personal trading and collection account, active since 2021. MadFactory is the creator umbrella under which the 2022 1/1 drops live. Both are public; the connection between them is documented from Thomas's own tweets and from the matching bio language.
opensea.io/MadBitcoins
Ethereum · Personal · Joined 2021-09-05
addr: 0x4d974ee5a0d187caf2012028df45dc3fa8098f08
Personal collector/trader account. Bio: "Spreading the word about #Bitcoin since 2013." This is the account Thomas used to publicly promote the wrapped Curio Cards through the 2021 bull run, where he posted from countless times in 2021–2024 hyping curiocardswrapper sales. Not the creator of the Mad Factory drops — those live on a different wallet.
Creator umbrella for the 2022 Mad Factory drops. Bio: "Mad Factory NFTs is a collection of unique digital artworks created by Thomas Hunt (Curio Cards)." The OpenSea-displayed "dateJoined" of 2025-09-09 reflects when the MadFactory username was claimed; the wallet's actual minting history goes back to September 2022 (the launch of CurioXMidJourney and Mad Rabbitz).[7]
@MyCurioCards — joined 2021-08-13For completeness, the related rediscovery-team account: opensea.io/MyCurioCards (wallet 0x5af3…bf36, joined 2021-08-13). This is not Thomas's account — it's the canonical Curio Cards rediscovery account run by the MyCurioCards team — but it's the obvious adjacent profile that completes the picture: the brand, separated from the co-founder's personal trading account.
Section IV · The umbrella
Mad Factory, September 2022 — four collections, 74 1/1 NFTs.
THE FOUR MAD FACTORY COVERS + ITEM SAMPLES
Mad Factory is the OpenSea-side creator umbrella. Four verified collections live under it as of May 2026 — three launched on the same day (Sept 27, 2022) and one a month later (Oct 26, 2022). All are MidJourney-assisted or MidJourney-related remix art. Every totalSupply below was pulled fresh from OpenSea's CollectionStats field on May 18, 2026.[1] For the long-form art-historical readings of each, see the in-flight Mad Art essays.
OpenSea description: "Remixed works by MidJourney featuring the NFTs Curio Card Collection. These works have been commissioned by Curio Cards Founder Thomas Hunt (aka Mad Bitcoins)." 30 1/1 NFTs — one MidJourney remix per original Curio card. The keystone of Mad Factory.
OpenSea description: "Created by MadBitcoins X MidJourney. Part of the Mad Factory project." Twelve 1/1 rabbit-themed AI-art NFTs. Same launch day as CurioXMidJourney.
OpenSea description: "There are only twelve Curio Samurai. MadBitcoins X MidJourney." Twelve 1/1 samurai-themed AI-art NFTs. Launched 6 minutes after CurioXMidJourney on Sept 27, 2022.
Curio remix art by Greer Andy, the artist's first NFT drop. "1/1 collectible NFTs, all proceeds go directly to the artist who is making NFTs for the first time," per Thomas's announce tweet. A different mode than the MidJourney drops — this one is human-artist-led, Mad-Factory-curated.
THE DERIVATIVE ECOSYSTEM — SEQUEL + COMMUNITY REMIXES + WRAPPED ORIGINALS
The 2021 rediscovery did not stop at the wrapping. Within months, a derivative ecosystem grew up around the original 30 cards: a sequel project, community remix collections (some commissioned by original Curio artists themselves), and Thomas's own MidJourney pass at the same source material. Each entry below has a working OpenSea slug and a verified totalSupply, fetched May 18, 2026.[1] Footnotes flag ambiguous cases.
The official sequel to Curio Cards, launched via a Clubhouse drop party on October 7, 2021 — six days after the Christie's auction. Original CurioPlusOrg tweet: "We are excited to present you the sequel of Curio Cards! Continuing the original DNA and Ethos of Curio Cards. Helping lesser known artists and providing a wide variety of NFT art." Mass-mint scale (94,140 supply) is the inverse of the original 30-card scarcity. Thomas helped seed the project — Daniel Friedman and Marisol Vengas (two of the original Curio artists) are involved.[8]
OpenSea description: "Remixed works by KingDingus featuring the NFTs Curio Card Collection. These works have been commissioned by Curio Cards artist Marisol Vengas (#27, #28, #29)." Marisol Vengas (Max Infeld) commissioning a community remix of the original work she was part of — a clean piece of inside-the-canon derivative work.
OpenSea description: "Remixed works by Mr. Black featuring the NFTs Curio Card Collection. These works have been commissioned by Curio Cards artist Marisol Vengas (#27, #28, #29)." Same commissioning artist (Marisol Vengas), different remixer (artistmrblack). Marisol's "first ever Curiocards" remix tweet from Feb 8, 2022 announced this drop.
OpenSea description: "CurioApples is a collection of 138 CurioApples — each on unique colored backgrounds. These works are inspired in part by the artwork Apples by Curio Card artist Phneep. Each color is used only once in this collection. … This collection has been designed and styled by MadBitcoins and Marisol Vengas." A direct Thomas Hunt + Marisol Vengas (Curio artist #27–29) collaboration on the OpenSea Shared Storefront, each apple keyed to a unique W3 named CSS color. Predates the Mad Factory umbrella by seven months. Distinct from the Sept 2022 XN--CARD ASCII-art Apples remix by @0xTwicer (40 supply, dropped under Punycodes' The Puny Factory as a Curio DAO × Punycodes DAO collab) — a separate project.[11]
The CurioXMidJourney collection on Mad Factory (above, Section IV) is Thomas's contribution to the derivative ecosystem — 30 MidJourney remixes, one per original card, "commissioned by Curio Cards Founder Thomas Hunt (aka Mad Bitcoins)" per the OpenSea description. It's the only such project where the original co-founder is also the remixer.
I looked for the following names from common Curio-rediscovery-era chatter and could not verify a corresponding OpenSea collection slug on May 18, 2026: "Curio Cards Series 2,""Curio Mythicals,""Curio Goblins,""Curio 30/30 Anniversary,""Curio Foundation,""Curio Souvenirs,""Curio Wrapped" (as a distinct collection — the wrapper is curiocardswrapper, slug above), "CuriousAddys,""CurioDAO." Some of these may exist as community-art series under other slugs or on other platforms (SuperRare, Foundation, Manifold); none surface in Thomas's own tweet corpus or in the brain.db twitter archive of MadBitcoins outbound posts.[9] A "Curio Art Story set" reference appears in a Feb 2026 tweet from collector @adjumArt, but the link points back to curiocardswrapper — i.e., the original wrapped 30, not a separate Series 2.[10]
What's listed in the Curio Wiki
The Curio Wiki at /curio-wiki/ lists 68 articles. The wiki notes that Robek (Curio artist of cards 21–23) "has since continued rewarding holders with Curio Cards remixes by artists including 0010, Rylen, and sgt_slaughtermelon" — those are individual artist drops rewarded directly to existing holders, not standalone enumerable collections in the Mad Factory / CurioPlus mold, but they're part of the same derivative-ecosystem fabric. The wiki is the place to dig further; this report is the marketplace-side ledger.
Section VI · The ledger
Wallets & contract addresses.
Every wallet and contract referenced anywhere above, gathered into one table. Addresses are pulled from public on-chain data and OpenSea profile pages. Useful for anyone trying to verify the arc themselves.
Label
Address / slug
Chain · Role
Curio Cards original
0x73DA73EF3a6982109c4d5BDb0dB9dd3E3783f313
Ethereum · 2017 contract
Curio Cards Wrapper
opensea.io/collection/curiocardswrapper
Ethereum · ERC-1155 wrap
MyCurioCards profile
0x5af3e0472315ec9a6e8b101c0a29da33a575bf36
Ethereum · rediscovery team
MadBitcoins profile
0x4d974ee5a0d187caf2012028df45dc3fa8098f08
Ethereum · Thomas personal
MadFactory profile
0x5fd2045e216491c4514965524fa2a25f38998c73
Ethereum · Thomas creator
WAX wallet (Thomas)
cekb4.wam
WAX · Thomas creator
WAX collection
madbitcoins1 (contract: atomicassets)
WAX · "Mad Bitcoins 2021 NFT Collection"
CurioXMidJourney
opensea.io/collection/curioxmidjourney
Ethereum · Mad Factory · 30 supply
Mad Rabbitz
opensea.io/collection/madrabbitz
Ethereum · Mad Factory · 12 supply
Curio Samurai
opensea.io/collection/curiosamurai
Ethereum · Mad Factory · 12 supply
CurioXGreer Andy
opensea.io/collection/curioxgreer-andy-collection
Ethereum · Mad Factory · 20 supply
CurioXKingDingus
opensea.io/collection/curioxkingdingus
Ethereum · community remix · 38 supply
CurioXMrBlack
opensea.io/collection/curioxmrblack
Ethereum · community remix · 23 supply
CurioApples
opensea.io/collection/curio-apples
Ethereum · MadBitcoins×Marisol · 141 supply
CurioApples creator wallet
0x33292f8cb2afb4bf155d366278ab988e29833da4
Ethereum · CurioApples mint source
OpenSea Shared Storefront
0x495f947276749ce646f68ac8c248420045cb7b5e
Ethereum · ERC-1155 (hosts CurioApples)
CurioPlusOrg Collection 1
opensea.io/collection/curioplusorg-collection-1
Ethereum · sequel · 94,140 supply
Section VII · The full arc
Nine-year timeline, May 2017 → May 2026.
ONE IMAGE PER YEAR-MARKER ACROSS THE NINE-YEAR ARC
Every dated event in the report, in one list. Sources: brain.db's twitter_archive table for Thomas's tweets; AtomicAssets API for WAX timestamps; OpenSea collection metadata for Mad Factory launch dates; the Curio Cards story article for 2017/2021 dating.
2017-05-09
Curio Cards launch — Thomas Hunt, Travis Uhrig, Rhett Creighton release the 30-card art collection on Ethereum. Three months before CryptoPunks.
2017–2020
Project lies dormant. Cards trade peer-to-peer rarely. Founders move on.
2021-03-15
Thomas tweets confirming the three Curio Cards co-creators (@HeyRhet / @travisformayor / @MadBitcoins). The rediscovery is in motion.
2021-03-29
WAX collection madbitcoins1 created on AtomicHub. Thomas's first creator NFTs on a new chain (block 111,092,957).
2021-05-09
WAX membership schema created — the Mad Bitcoins Collector's Club Membership Card. 111 cards minted.
2021-05-17
First "Private Meeting — MadBitcoins NFT Collector's Club #LIVE" on WCN. The club is on.
2021-05-25
WAX nftadventure schema created — the Adventures in #NFTs show launches on WCN. 8 guest portraits, 5 editions each.
2021-05-27
Travis Uhrig interview airs on Adventures in #NFTs. Thomas tweets: "Finally an #NFT show that has it's own #NFTs!"
opensea.io/MadBitcoins joins OpenSea — Thomas's personal Ethereum profile. Bio: "Spreading the word about #Bitcoin since 2013."
2021-10-01
Christie's auction of a complete Curio Cards set. ~$1.2M. The rediscovery is now market-validated.
2021-10-07
CurioPlusOrg Collection 1 launches via Clubhouse drop party. The official sequel. 94,140 supply.
2022-02-08
CurioXMrBlack — community Curio remix by artistmrblack, commissioned by Marisol Vengas. 23 supply.
2022-04-30
CurioXKingDingus — community Curio remix by KingDingusArt, commissioned by Marisol Vengas. 38 supply.
2022-06-22
OpenSea's mid-2022 retrospective names @MyCurioCards the year's "Top Art Collection by Volume."
2022-09-27
Mad Factory launches — three collections drop the same day: CurioXMidJourney (30), Mad Rabbitz (12), Curio Samurai (12). Thomas becomes a MidJourney-prompt-engineer-as-creator.
2022-10-26
CurioXGreer Andy launches on Mad Factory — 20 supply, the artist's first NFT drop.
2023-01-24
Thomas tweets: "3 more CurioXMidJourney sold — only 21 remain." So 9 of the 30 had sold by then.
2024–2025
Quiet stretch on the creator side; ongoing activity on the wrapped-originals side. Cumulative volume on curiocardswrapper passes 41,300 ETH.
2025-09-09
MadFactory username claimed on OpenSea (the on-page dateJoined). Wallet had been minting since 2022.
Nine years is a long time on Ethereum. The mainnet itself is barely older. Thomas Hunt's NFT arc starts at the genesis of art-on-Ethereum — May 9, 2017, the first Curio Card — and runs through every era since. The 2017 cards lay dormant because there was no market and no vocabulary. The 2021 rediscovery happened because someone went looking, and the contracts had not moved. The Christie's auction in October that year was the market catching up to history. The wrapping was the technical bridge that let history be tradeable.
Between rediscovery and now, Thomas did not stop creating. The WAX collection, minted in the spring of 2021, was the experiment — a different chain, a different fee structure, a different audience. The Collector's Club membership cards, the show-portrait NFTs for Adventures in #NFTs, the few pre-show experimental mints — 171 assets in total, 11 templates, 3 schemas, all under one collection named madbitcoins1 on a wallet called cekb4.wam. It is the only chain where Thomas's NFTs sit alongside Garbage Pail Kids and BroPunks in a single profile inventory. WAX never became the dominant NFT chain, but it was where Thomas chose to be a creator before he was ready to be a creator on Ethereum.
Mad Factory in September 2022 is the Ethereum-side answer to the WAX experiment. Three drops in a single day — CurioXMidJourney, Mad Rabbitz, Curio Samurai — all MidJourney-assisted, all 1/1, all by the same Mad-Factory wallet. A fourth drop, CurioXGreer Andy, followed a month later. 74 1/1 NFTs across the four. The art-historical reading lives in the parallel Mad Art essays; the marketplace-side reading is in front of you. Together: the same person, doing the same thing — finding artists, remixing source material, putting things on a blockchain — that he did in May 2017, only this time the source material is his own founding artifact.
The two OpenSea profiles, MadBitcoins and MadFactory, are the cleanest single piece of evidence that this is a deliberate, multi-account arc. MadBitcoins is the personal trader. MadFactory is the creator umbrella. Both belong to Thomas; both have bios that link back to him; the addresses are different but the brand is the same. And the derivative ecosystem around Curio — CurioPlusOrg, CurioXKingDingus, CurioXMrBlack, the Robek-curated artist drops, the Mad Factory MidJourney remix — is what happens when a foundational artifact is finally rediscovered: everyone wants to make a remix. Some are inside the canon (commissioned by the original artists). Some are sequel projects in a different mode. One — Thomas's own — is the rare case where the founder is also the remixer.
Everything else is a remix. The CurioBot tagline is the keystone. The 30 cards in May 2017 are the well. The 21,346 wrapped tokens, the 74 Mad Factory pieces, the 171 WAX mints, the 94,140 CurioPlus sequel mints, the 38 KingDingus remixes, the 23 Mr. Black remixes, the artist drops from Robek's collectors and Marisol's commissioned remixes — all of it drinks from the same source. And the source, the original 30, lives on the chain and will keep living there until Ethereum doesn't. Nine years in, that's the record.
Footnotes & verification
Sources & verification notes.
OpenSea totalSupply verification. Every totalSupply figure cited in this report (21,346 for curiocardswrapper; 30 for curioxmidjourney; 12 for madrabbitz; 12 for curiosamurai; 20 for curioxgreer-andy-collection; 38 for curioxkingdingus; 23 for curioxmrblack; 141 for curio-apples; 94,140 for curioplusorg-collection-1) was pulled from the OpenSea collection page on May 18, 2026 by fetching the public HTML and parsing the embedded CollectionStats.totalSupply field from the OpenSea Apollo client state — or, where the SPA shell needed to hydrate (the curio-apples case), by driving Chrome over the DevTools Protocol and reading the rendered DOM after a load-and-scroll wait. See note [11] for the CurioApples-specific method. OpenSea's public API at api.opensea.io requires an API key and was not used.
Co-creator attribution. Confirmed by Thomas Hunt's own tweet of March 15, 2021: "http://Curio.cards was created in 2017 by @HeyRhet @travisformayor & @MadBitcoins #curiocards. Referenced in the ERC-721 spec." Cross-referenced in the Curio Cards story on 1n2.org and in the Curio Wiki at /curio-wiki/.
The first wrapper had a fatal bug. Per the Curio Wiki entry on Curio Cards: "The first rushed third-party wrapper had a fatal bug: tokens sent to it became permanently stuck ('permawrapped'), making Card #26 the rarest tradeable card with only 105 remaining in circulation." The fixed wrapper is the current curiocardswrapper contract.
OpenSea 2022 retrospective. Thomas Hunt retweeted, June 22, 2022: "This year's 'Top Art Collection by Volume' Goes to…🥁 @MyCurioCards 🎉" from @opensea. Source: brain.db table twitter_archive, full_text match on %opensea% ordered by created_at desc.
Cumulative volume claim."To this day, we've done over 41,300 ETH in" — @MyCurioCards quote tweeted by @MadBitcoins on 2026-02-19. Truncated at the 280-char tweet limit in the brain.db archive. The figure refers to cumulative Curio Cards Wrapper volume on OpenSea.
WAX collection facts. Verified May 18, 2026 via the public AtomicAssets API: https://wax.api.atomicassets.io/atomicassets/v1/accounts/cekb4.wam (lists collections in the account's inventory), https://wax.api.atomicassets.io/atomicassets/v1/collections/madbitcoins1/stats (assets/burned/templates/schemas counts), https://wax.api.atomicassets.io/atomicassets/v1/schemas?collection_name=madbitcoins1 (schema list with asset counts), and https://wax.api.atomicassets.io/atomicassets/v1/templates?collection_name=madbitcoins1&order=asc&sort=created (full template list with issued/max supply and names).
MadFactory dateJoined. The OpenSea profile page for opensea.io/MadFactory shows "dateJoined":"2025-09-09T05:42:12.117Z" in the Apollo client state. This reflects when the MadFactory username was claimed on OpenSea, not when the underlying wallet first minted. The wallet (0x5fd2…8c73) was the minter of the CurioXMidJourney, Mad Rabbitz, and Curio Samurai drops on Sept 27, 2022, three years earlier. The MadBitcoins profile (0x4d97…8f08) was joined 2021-09-05, the earlier date, consistent with the personal-account-first, creator-umbrella-later pattern.
CurioPlusOrg involvement. Thomas's October 7–9, 2021 tweet thread is the primary evidence: "Pretty sweet to see new collectors joining @CurioPlusOrg. Reminds me of when we started @MyCurioCards! … ARTISTS WANTED -- join the discord" — plus a follow-up CurioPlusOrg tweet calling it "the sequel of Curio Cards. Continuing the original DNA and Ethos of Curio Cards. Helping lesser known artists." The supply of 94,140 is consistent with a mass-sequel mint structure. Daniel Friedman and Marisol Vengas (two of the original 7 Curio artists) are credited in connection with the project.
What I searched for and didn't find. Method: brain.db query SELECT raw_text FROM items WHERE source LIKE 'twitter_%' AND raw_text LIKE '%curio %' OR raw_text LIKE '%CurioDAO%' OR raw_text LIKE '%CuriousAddys%' OR raw_text LIKE '%curio rabbit%' OR raw_text LIKE '%curio mythical%' OR raw_text LIKE '%curio series%' OR raw_text LIKE '%CurioSouvenirs%' OR raw_text LIKE '%curio wrapped%' OR raw_text LIKE '%curiocards2%' OR raw_text LIKE '%curio cards 2.0%' — only one matching tweet in the entire MadBitcoins outbound corpus, and that one was a 2021 reference to "https://curio.cards/ #CurioCards2017" (i.e., the original, not a Series 2). I also tested the OpenSea slug existence directly for plausible variants (curiocards2, curiomythicals, etc.) by curling the collection URL; none returned a populated CollectionStats object. Possible reasons: (a) no such drops happened on OpenSea; (b) they happened under a different slug I didn't guess; (c) they happened on a different marketplace (SuperRare, Foundation, Manifold) outside this report's scope. I am calling it "not found, pending evidence" rather than "doesn't exist."
"Curio Art Story set" reference. Tweet by @adjumArt, Feb 1, 2026: "I am pleased to announce that I have completed my collection of @MyCurioCards's Art Story set!" The link in the tweet resolves to opensea.io/adjumArt?…collectionSlugs=curiocardswrapper — i.e., the collector is filtering their portfolio by the wrapped-originals collection. "Art Story set" is collector shorthand for the original 30, not a separate drop.
CurioApples verification. Verified May 18, 2026 by driving a real Chrome instance via Chrome DevTools Protocol against https://opensea.io/collection/curio-apples (the OpenSea v2 public API returned 401 without a key). Confirmed facts pulled from the hydrated DOM and embedded JSON-LD: collection name "CurioApples," chain Ethereum, "141 UNIQUE" live item count, launch month FEB 2022, og:image at i2c.seadn.io/ethereum/aa8f583b…/b130293…jpeg, schema.org Brand block crediting "designed and styled by MadBitcoins and Marisol Vengas," sameAs links to CurioApples.com and instagram.com/curioapples. The 138 vs. 141 discrepancy: the OpenSea description says "138 CurioApples" (the artists' stated intent), while the on-chain mint count is 141 — likely a small overshoot during mint, leaving 3 extra. Contract address is the OpenSea Shared Storefront ERC-1155 (0x495f947276749ce646f68ac8c248420045cb7b5e), with the creator-wallet identity encoded in the top 20 bytes of each token ID: 0x33292f8cb2afb4bf155d366278ab988e29833da4. That wallet is the mint source — at fetch time it held 97 unsold CurioApples plus 1 XN--CARD (Puny Factory) and 1 Apple II E from curioxgreer-andy-collection, consistent with the MadBitcoins / Curio orbit but without an OpenSea display-name set. Floor price and total volume both displayed as "—" (no active listings) on fetch day. Distinction from the Sept 2022 Puny Factory XN--CARD drop (40 supply, ASCII-art Apples remix by @0xTwicer, framed as a Curio DAO × Punycodes DAO collab — see the @MyCurioCards quote tweet of Sept 21, 2022 in brain.db) is established by separate slug, separate supply, separate artist, separate factory.
Card #26 — Education (Daniel Friedman) — the rarest tradeable card after the wrapper bug
@MyCurioCards — the rediscovery-team profileBecause the cards live on Ethereum, the project is also data. The 1n2 Curio properties — built by Thomas with his co-founder identity restored to public view — are the editorial and analytical surface area on top of the on-chain layer. Curio Wiki is the 68-article encyclopedia (artists, projects, shows, events). Curio Quant is the AI Card Market Intelligence dashboard — 180 collector profiles mined from 15,963 on-chain sales, 125 holders vs 55 flippers. Curio Prices tracks floor history. Curio Atlas visualizes the holder network. Curio Map shows distribution. Curio Charts is the live dashboard. All of it pulls from the same on-chain data, all of it lives on 1n2.org, all of it exists because somebody co-created the cards back in 2017 and then never quite stopped paying attention.
