Ethereum Curio Cards

Information

Created: 9 May 2017
Creator: San Francisco’s Bitcoin Community
Blockchain: Ethereum

Description

The Gallery Nobody Visited

How a digital art collection launched on Ethereum in 2017 went largely unnoticed, only to reappear four years later at Christie’s with a price tag of $1.27 million.

An apple on the blockchain

On 9 May 2017, a digital illustration of an apple appeared on the Ethereum blockchain. It was called Apples, the artist went by the name Phneep, and the artwork was the first card in a collection called Curio Cards.

The image was modest enough: a red apple against a blue, circuit-board-like background. Collectors could buy a token representing one copy of the artwork for around fifty cents to a dollar. There was no auction house involved, no established market for Ethereum art and no guarantee that anybody would be interested.

Four years later, on 1 October 2021, a complete Curio Cards collection sold at Christie’s in New York for 393 ether, worth $1,267,320 at the time. The lot contained thirty numbered artworks and an extra card that had not been part of the official release. The auction also marked the first time Christie’s had conducted a live sale with bidding exclusively in Ethereum.

Between the apple and the auction lay a curious history of homemade smart contracts, seven artists, a forgotten online gallery and a programming mistake that collectors would eventually treat as part of the collection itself.

Three people and an art show

Curio Cards grew out of San Francisco’s Bitcoin community, where enthusiasts gathered to discuss cryptocurrency and occasionally tried to explain it to people who had not already made up their minds about it.

Thomas Hunt, better known as Mad Bitcoins, had been producing cryptocurrency videos since 2013. He was also a collector of baseball cards and Magic: The Gathering cards. The combination suggested a way of bringing one of his interests into the other. What if digital artwork could be collected like trading cards, with a limited supply and a record of ownership that did not depend entirely on a company keeping its own database?

Travis Uhrig, a software developer who organised Bitcoin meetups in San Francisco, approached the idea from another direction. He had come to believe that art could make cryptocurrency easier to understand. He and Hunt had already organised a physical crypto-art exhibition called Proof of Art, which grew out of conversations with the Bitcoin street artist Cryptograffiti.

For Uhrig, the experience offered an alternative to the usual argument that cryptocurrency adoption depended mainly on making the technology easier to use. Art could give people a reason to take an interest in the first place. Somebody might come to an exhibition for the pictures and leave with a better understanding of Bitcoin.

The next step was to take the gallery online, reaching artists and collectors beyond the San Francisco meetup circuit. Hunt's interest in collecting suggested the format; Uhrig came up with the name. Curio referred to a curiosity or rare antique object, while also echoing curated, reflecting the intention to assemble a collection with contributions from different artists.

They needed somebody who could build it.

That person was Rhett Creighton, a software developer with an unusual background. He had appeared as a child in Crocodile Dundee II before studying physics and nuclear engineering at MIT. By the time he joined the project, he was already experimenting with cryptocurrency development and had created ZClassic, a fork of Zcash.

Creighton initially proposed giving Curio its own version of Ethereum. Uhrig objected that this would leave the cards stranded on a separate blockchain with little surrounding activity. If the point was to create a gallery for digital collectors, it made more sense to put it where other people were already building things.

They chose Ethereum's public network. That decision meant the cards' contracts and transaction histories would remain part of the same blockchain that later became home to a much larger NFT market.

Curio Cards was not the first attempt to put collectibles on a blockchain. Spells of Genesis had been issuing digital cards through Counterparty, a token system built on Bitcoin, since 2015. Rare Pepe followed in 2016, using internet memes as the basis for a collectible community. All three Curio founders were familiar with these projects.

They wanted to carry the idea further on Ethereum, with many artists and a wider range of subjects rather than one recurring character or visual theme. They also made a straightforward promise: all proceeds from original card sales would go to the artists. The founders would take no cut.

Building the gallery before NFTs had a standard

Today, launching an NFT collection can be relatively simple because much of the technical work is handled by existing software and established standards. In 2017, the necessary conventions had not yet settled into place. The ERC-721 proposal, which defined the familiar interface for non-fungible tokens on Ethereum, was created on 24 January 2018, more than eight months after Curio Cards launched.

Creighton had to work with the tools available. The closest useful building block was ERC-20, the token standard used for cryptocurrencies and the initial coin offerings then becoming popular.

ERC-20 was designed for interchangeable tokens. One unit of a conventional token could be exchanged for another without changing what either represented. Curio Cards needed something more specific: limited runs of different artworks, each with its own supply, while allowing collectors to buy and transfer copies.

Creighton adapted the ERC-20 approach. Each card design had its own smart contract and a fixed supply of non-divisible tokens. A collector who bought Apples received tokens representing copies of that edition. Those copies were interchangeable with one another, but they were not interchangeable with Nuts or any other card.

The distinction is similar to that between limited-edition prints and an original painting. Several people can own copies of the same print, but the edition itself is different from every other edition. The token records a collector's place in that edition; it does not prevent people from copying the image or automatically give the owner its copyright.

The contracts also contained an IPFS content identifier pointing to the artwork. The InterPlanetary File System is a distributed way of addressing and sharing files. Rather than relying solely on an ordinary website address, a file can be identified through a reference tied to its contents. Curio's approach recorded that reference in the contract, connecting the token to the image without storing the image itself on Ethereum.

That distinction matters because storing images directly on Ethereum would have been expensive. IPFS also does not guarantee that a file will remain available forever. Someone still has to preserve or host it. Nevertheless, linking the artwork's content identifier to an on-chain record was a practical way to reduce dependence on the project's website.

Purchases happened through what the founders called vending machines. These were smart contracts linked from the Curio Cards website. A buyer selected a card, sent ether to the appropriate contract and received the tokens. There was no OpenSea marketplace to browse; buyers had to visit the project's own site.

The original site and surviving contract code offer a glimpse of how it worked. Compared with today's NFT platforms, the system was rather hands-on, but it allowed artists to sell directly to collectors without a conventional intermediary administering the transaction.

The team also experimented with the way supplies were determined. For the first ten cards, a large number of tokens was made available, and unsold copies were destroyed at the end of the sales period. The final print run therefore depended on how many people actually bought the artwork. For cards 11 through 30, the artists chose their own supplies.

The prices began at around fifty cents and rose to roughly a dollar. The first ten cards produced supplies in the hundreds or thousands, depending on demand. Across the thirty official series, approximately 29,700 cards were originally minted.

The idea was simple enough: artists could earn money from limited-edition digital prints, while collectors could verify their ownership and the number of copies that existed. At the time, that required a fair amount of custom engineering.

Thirty cards, seven artists

Phneep created the first ten cards. He was already known for parody film posters made for Hunt's Mad Bitcoins show, and the brief for Curio was to tell a story about art.

The sequence begins with Apples, followed by Nuts and Berries. These give way to the materials used to make art: Clay, Paint and Ink. Next come the things artists make from them: Sculpture, Painting and Book. The tenth card, Future, looks ahead.

The progression is playful rather than rigorous. Apples has its red fruit against a technological background; Painting uses the Mona Lisa; Book gives the printed word a place in a digital collection. It is a small visual history of human creativity, told through everyday objects and familiar references.

The next three cards, numbers 11 to 13, came from Cryptograffiti. His work drew on street art and Bitcoin activism, including stickers he had placed on ATMs and bank premises around San Francisco. He reworked recognisable financial logos, replacing their familiar messages with Bitcoin references. Corporate branding became a way to make a point about the financial system Bitcoin was intended to challenge.

Phneep returned for cards 14 to 16, playing with the visual language of consumer brands and cryptocurrency terminology. These cards extended the collection's use of parody and included a charitable fundraising element. The artists were not merely supplying pictures for a token project; they were experimenting with ways to support their work through it.

Cards 17 to 19 came from Luis Buenaventura, who worked under the name Cryptopop. His contribution featured dogs and crypto-related humour. UASF referred to the user-activated soft fork debate, part of the contentious argument over Bitcoin's future during 2017. To The Moon played on the optimistic expression used by cryptocurrency traders anticipating rising prices. Dogs Trading placed dogs around a poker table, with cryptocurrency references tucked into the scene, including a Monero coin being passed under the table.

The cards capture the culture surrounding cryptocurrency at the time: political disagreements about how networks should develop, financial optimism and jokes that made sense to people who followed the daily arguments.

Card 20 brought Phneep back with a portrait of Mad Bitcoins. Hunt appears in a James Bond-style outfit, complete with the accessories of a cryptocurrency adventurer. The card was also an experiment in patronage, intended as a way for viewers to support Hunt's show directly. The idea did not work out as a fundraiser, but it anticipated a familiar question in online creator communities: could fans support the person behind the work without going through a conventional media business?

The next artist arrived without an invitation. Robek World had found the project through its open call and became the first community artist to contribute. His cards, numbers 21 to 23, portrayed the three founders as fantasy-game characters. Hunt became The Wizard, Uhrig The Bard and Creighton The Barbarian.

The cards turned the people behind the gallery into characters in its own little world. Robek also made a promotional video for the trio and selected supplies for his editions, making The Barbarian scarcer than the other two. Collectors wanting the full set had a reason to seek it out. Card 23 was animated, with a short loop of just a few frames.

Cards 24 to 26 marked another change of direction. Daniel Friedman, an entomology researcher as well as an artist, contributed hand-drawn abstract patterns. He drew the works on paper and scanned them into digital form, bringing a physical drawing process into the collection.

Friedman also used descending supplies to distinguish the cards. Complexity had 333 copies, Passion 222 and Education 111. The numerical sequence gave the three works an order of their own, and Education became one of the collection's scarcest official cards.

Cards 27 to 29, titled Blue, Pink and Yellow, came from Marisol Vengas, the shared name of an art collective. The group worked with real photographs, layering artistic treatments over images of buildings to produce bold, colour-focused pieces. The supplies were 600, 400 and 200 respectively.

The collection ended with Eclipse, card 30, by the pseudonymous artist Thoros of Myr. The animated image shows a yellow sun and a cartoon raccoon drifting across it. The supply was 821 copies, a reference to 21 August 2017, the date of a total solar eclipse that crossed the United States. The file also pushed the limits of what the project could manage in animation at the time.

The thirty cards were an untidy but appealing mixture of illustration, satire, portraiture, abstraction, photography and animation. They did not share a house style, and the project made no attempt to impose one. The variety was the point: a gallery could bring together artists who had little in common beyond an interest in making and distributing digital work.

The card that was never meant to exist

The official collection had thirty numbered cards. The complete historical set now commonly includes a thirty-first, known as 17b, the misprint.

Its story began with the dog cards. During deployment, the vending machines for cards 18 and 19 were found to be broken and unable to sell tokens. Creighton corrected the problem and redeployed the relevant contracts. The official cards 17, 18 and 19 were then released.

But the first version of card 17 had worked perfectly well. It had been created during testing on Ethereum's main network, a practice that was more common in those days, when development tools were less mature and transaction costs were low. When the corrected contracts went live, the earlier version remained on the blockchain, still functional but no longer linked from the website.

It was not an intentional variant. The team simply forgot about it.

The card was another version of UASF, Cryptopop's cartoon dog. According to the project's official account of 17b, the accidental contract was deployed on 20 June 2017. Its existence went largely unnoticed until collectors began investigating Curio Cards in 2021.

The mistake exposes a small but useful distinction between what a programmer intends and what a blockchain records. Ethereum preserved the contract exactly as deployed. It had no way of knowing that the developers regarded it as an unwanted leftover.

Once collectors found it, they had to decide whether it belonged in the collection or was merely debris from a testing process. It had been created in 2017, used the same artwork and approach, and could still be acquired through its original vending machine. The community eventually accepted it as part of Curio's history.

The result is an odd collector's rule: a complete set commonly means the thirty official cards plus a misprint that was never supposed to be there. The programming error became part of the collection's provenance, and leaving it out would now make the set incomplete.

Four years in the quiet

For all the work that went into Curio Cards, the project struggled to attract buyers in 2017. Uhrig later recalled that he could barely give the cards away. The market for digital collectibles had not yet developed, and much of the cryptocurrency enthusiasm that year was directed towards token sales and speculation rather than buying limited-edition art.

Hunt and Creighton moved on to other projects. Uhrig continued to provide technical support to the small number of holders and kept the website running, although the links to the original vending machines were removed. The contracts remained on Ethereum.

That distinction became crucial. The project had largely stopped operating, but the blockchain had not forgotten it. The original transactions and contract code remained available, allowing later collectors to work out what had happened.

The cards were not being updated to suit new fashions, and the original contracts could not simply be used to increase their supplies. The artworks and their transaction histories sat where they had been since 2017, while the surrounding NFT market developed without them.

By early 2021, NFTs had become a subject of intense interest. A group of collectors began digging through Ethereum's history for projects that had appeared before the market took off. Some called themselves NFT archaeologists. They examined old contracts, archived websites and code repositories to find forgotten projects and reconstruct how they had worked.

Curio Cards attracted their attention because the surviving records showed that it was an early Ethereum art collection with a functioning purchase mechanism. The rediscovery is commonly associated with a Twitter account called DieAping, which published instructions explaining how to buy cards through the original contracts. Archived versions of the website and copies of the vending-machine code helped make this possible. Rather than keep the method to themselves, the account shared it publicly.

Buyers arrived, and the cards began disappearing from the original supplies. Trading initially took place informally through the community, before a modern marketplace solution was available. NFT historian Adam McBride later facilitated what appears to have been the first sale of a complete set, for around 100 ether, then worth approximately $300,000.

There was an odd coincidence in the timing. Uhrig had handed in his notice at his day job before Curio Cards was rediscovered. When he announced his departure, news of the discovery followed a couple of hours later. Some people assumed that the sudden interest in the cards had prompted his decision. It had not.

Curio had not been planning a comeback. The old contracts were found because somebody took the trouble to look.

The problem with old tokens

The new interest brought a practical problem. Curio Cards had been created before the token standards modern NFT marketplaces expected, so the original tokens were not readily compatible with platforms such as OpenSea.

The solution was a wrapper contract. A wrapper holds an older token inside a new token that conforms to a more modern standard. Curio's official wrapper used ERC-1155, allowing the original cards to be represented in a form that modern marketplaces could handle.

The wrapper did not create new artwork or expand the original supplies. It made old tokens easier to trade through newer systems. A card appearing as a newly minted item on OpenSea was an existing 2017 token being wrapped, not a fresh copy of the original edition.

The first attempt at wrapping Curio Cards, however, went badly. A third-party wrapper had a bug that prevented deposited cards from being released. Tokens sent into it became stuck. The community called them permawrapped.

The trapped cards could still be transferred and traded in their wrapped form, but they could not be returned to their original state. That left collectors debating whether such cards were lost or merely held in a different form. It also complicated estimates of the remaining supply, especially for scarce editions.

The official ERC-1155 wrapper was developed through a collaboration between members of the original team and the community. A separate wrapper for 17b followed in 2022. The distinction between original tokens and wrapped versions remains important: all Curio Cards were minted in 2017, and no further original copies can be created.

Cardholders also voted for a one per cent royalty on secondary trades through OpenSea, with the proceeds going to the original artists. The arrangement continued the principle established at launch: the founders would not take a share of the artists' sales.

The episode showed how a token could remain intact on a blockchain while becoming awkward to use as the surrounding technology changed. A record of ownership is only part of the equation. Collectors also need wallets, marketplaces and contracts that can recognise and handle what they own.

Christie’s and the million-dollar set

By the middle of 2021, Curio Cards had moved from the fringes of NFT history into a market where collectors were paying attention to provenance and rarity. In August, Christie’s announced that a complete set would be offered in its Post-War to Present sale in New York.

The final lot included the thirty official cards and 17b. Christie’s estimated it at 250 to 350 ether. On 1 October, the set sold for 393 ether, worth $1,267,320 at the time. The reported buyer was Taylor Gerring, an early Ethereum contributor.

The sale was notable beyond the final price. Christie’s accepted live bids in ether, making this its first live auction conducted exclusively in that cryptocurrency. Curio Cards was the opening lot, and the wider Post-War to Present evening went on to realise about $34.4 million.

For cards that had originally sold for around a dollar apiece, the result was extraordinary. But the price reflected more than the images. A complete set brought together the artwork, the original on-chain records, the project's place in Ethereum's history and the scarcity created by missing or inaccessible cards.

The auction also exposed a tension in the original idea. Uhrig had wanted to make digital art accessible and help artists reach supporters directly. By 2021, some cards were selling for sums far beyond the reach of most ordinary collectors. He later told Quartz that he was somewhat uncomfortable with the prices the collection was commanding.

Curio had not been created as a fundraising vehicle or a speculative investment. Its founders had wanted to make a gallery where artists kept the proceeds from primary sales. The market eventually put a different value on the cards, one shaped by their age and scarcity as much as by the art itself.

Were they really NFTs?

Curio Cards is widely described as the first original digital-art collection released on Ethereum. That is a more defensible claim than calling it the first NFT of any kind.

Etheria, a virtual-land project, dates to 2015, while digital collectibles had already appeared on Bitcoin and Counterparty. The terminology was still developing when Curio launched, and the different projects represented ownership in different ways.

The later ERC-721 standard specifically discusses Curio Cards and Rare Pepe when explaining limited-edition collectible tokens. It distinguishes collections of interchangeable tokens tracked by separate contracts from individually distinguishable assets, each with its own unique identifier. Under the strict technical definition established by ERC-721, the original Curio Cards did not operate like modern ERC-721 collections.

That is why the original tokens needed wrapping before they could be traded easily on modern NFT marketplaces. They belonged to an earlier stage of experimentation, when developers were adapting existing token systems to represent digital ownership.

The distinction does not erase what Curio accomplished. It explains the problem the later standards were designed to address. ERC-721 provided a common interface for distinguishable assets, allowing wallets, marketplaces and other applications to support them more consistently. Curio had already tried several ideas that would become familiar in the NFT market: direct purchases through smart contracts, fixed supplies, on-chain ownership records, artwork referenced through IPFS and collections that brought different artists together.

The project is explicitly discussed in the ERC-721 specification, while the official Curio Cards documentation makes the narrower claim about being the first original digital-art collection on Ethereum.

Its history is less tidy than a simple first-place ranking. Curio Cards borrowed from projects that came before it, improvised with the tools available, and helped expose the practical issues that later standards would address. It was an early working example of how digital art could be issued, collected and transferred through Ethereum contracts.

A physical deck at last

Since the 2021 rediscovery, Curio Cards has developed a community around its history. Collectors maintain documentation and supply trackers, while Curio DAO provides a structure for holders and contributors to organise activity around the project.

The market has since moved through the same cycles of enthusiasm and retreat that affected NFTs more broadly. Some editions remain much scarcer than others. Education, for example, had only 111 original copies, and lost or inaccessible tokens make assembling a complete set harder than the original mint figures might suggest.

The collection has also appeared in the history books. TASCHEN's On NFTs included a spread on Curio Cards, giving the project a place in a printed survey of digital art. Then, in May 2024, a community member launched a Kickstarter campaign for a physical commemorative deck. It raised $3,817 from 26 backers, surpassing its target.

There is something fitting about that last detail. Curio Cards began by borrowing the familiar format of trading cards to make digital ownership easier to understand. Seven years later, collectors wanted a physical deck to commemorate the collection that had existed as tokens on a blockchain.

The original Apples contract still records the card's history. The cartoon founders remain frozen in their fantasy roles, and the raccoon in Eclipse continues its little trip across the sun. The website that once sold the cards to a handful of buyers has become an artefact of the period in which they were made.

For four years, hardly anybody wanted Curio Cards. Then collectors began looking for the history behind the NFT boom, and the old gallery was still there.

Supply of Curio cards

Card	Name	Total Supply	Burned	Remaining	Inactive	Active
1	Apples	2154	0	2154	961	1193
2	Nuts	1589	0	1589	248	1341
3	Berries	1635	0	1635	132	1503
4	Clay	510	0	510	40	470
5	Paint	438	0	438	40	398
6	Ink	438	0	438	37	401
7	Sculpture	2000	135	1865	38	1827
8	Painting	2000	1	1999	39	1960
9	Book	2000	183	1817	39	1778
10	Future	2000	0	2000	85	1915
11	BTC Keys	2000	0	2000	46	1954
12	Mine Bitcoin	2000	163	1837	40	1797
13	BTC	2000	0	2000	34	1966
14	CryptoCurrency	500	0	500	31	469
15	DigitalCash	500	0	500	162	338
16	Original	500	0	500	28	472
17	UASF	500	8	492	70	422
18	To The Moon	500	8	492	70	422
19	Dogs Trading	500	0	500	71	429
20	MadBitcoins	2000	453	1547	30	1517
21	The Wizard	500	0	500	439	61
22	The Bard	500	0	500	455	45
23	The Barbarian	250	0	250	198	52
24	Complexity	333	0	333	288	45
25	Passion	222	0	222	177	45
26	Education	111	0	111	0	111
27	Blue	600	35	565	8	557
28	Pink	400	0	400	13	387
29	Yellow	200	43	157	0	157
30	Eclipse	821	5	816	8	808
17b	UASFb	500	0	500	1	499