'My startup that was a failure suddenly became a huge success' — March 13, 2025

March 13, 2025. Exactly four years after the CurioCards rediscovery began in March 2021. MadBitcoins posts the cleanest self-summary of the entire CurioCards arc anyone — including Hunt himself — has ever written:

Four years ago today, my startup that was a failure suddenly became a huge success. @MyCurioCards Rediscovered March 13, 2021. #NFTHistory — @MadBitcoins, Mar 13, 2025 — 41 favs, 18 RTs

The 41/18 ratio is share-skewed by recent-era standards. Most current-events tweets in the era keep an 8:1 or worse fav-to-RT ratio. This one is barely 2.3:1 — meaning the audience actively wanted to forward the tweet to their own timelines. The economy of the statement is why.

The compression of the framing

"My startup that was a failure suddenly became a huge success" is twelve words doing the work of a memoir. It's also the most direct admission Hunt has ever made publicly about how CurioCards looked from 2017 through 2020. The project launched in May 2017. For four years it was, by any standard market measure, not succeeding. Trading volume was low. Owner counts were small. Press coverage was nonexistent. The 2017 NFT moment came and went without CurioCards being part of the conversation.

Then March 13, 2021 happened — the specific date the project was rediscovered. Within months, Christie's was running an auction. Within a year, Wikipedia had an article. Within four years (i.e., now, March 13, 2025), the historical canonization was complete. The tweet collapses that arc into a single sentence.

What "rediscovered" does as a frame

The word "rediscovered" is important. It implies that CurioCards was always good — that what changed in March 2021 wasn't the project's quality but the field's ability to see it. This framing has been part of Hunt's editorial position for years: the cards were always historically significant; the discourse just hadn't caught up.

By 2025 the framing was uncontroversial. Wikipedia accepts it. Museums accept it. Auction houses accept it. The "rediscovered" word is now the standard term for the March 13, 2021 inflection. Hunt's persistence on the vocabulary mattered. He could have called it "relaunched" or "revived" — words that imply the project changed. He called it "rediscovered" — a word that implies the field changed. The word stuck.

The #NFTHistory hashtag's institutional purpose

The recent-era #NFTHistory hashtag, used consistently across 2025, is doing institutional work. By tagging consistently, Hunt makes his archive findable to future researchers via tag search. The hashtag becomes the canonical entry point to the @MadBitcoins-side of NFT historical material. Every tagged tweet adds to the corpus.

This is steward work made explicit. The pivot era handled the historical positioning through cumulative milestones. The recent era handles it through tagging. The tag is a research-tool affordance — a way for someone in 2030 looking for the early-NFT story to find the @MadBitcoins-curated record by querying a single string.

Why the audience shared this tweet

The 18 retweets are unusually high for a personal-anniversary tweet in the era. The reason is that the tweet is structured as portable summary content. Someone with no prior CurioCards context can read it and learn the basic arc — May 9, 2017 launch, March 13, 2021 rediscovery, four years to canonization. The tweet's compressibility is what made it travel.

This is editorial discipline paying off late. By 2025, after years of resisting the urge to oversell the CurioCards story, Hunt could write a single tweet that did the selling for him because all the prior tweets had built the credibility for the framing. The audience read "huge success" as accurate rather than promotional because the receipts were public. The minimal tweet did maximum work.

The March 13, 2025 tweet is, in this sense, the late-archive complement to the September 9, 2021 Christie's tweet. The 2021 tweet was the moment. The 2025 tweet is the summary. Both work because of restraint. Both are written in the assumption that the audience will fill in everything not said.