CP#1 Curio Cards

Adapted from Privateindentity's Lab proposal

Curio Cards is the first known NFT Art collection issued on Ethereum, beginning on the 9th of May 2017 ending on the 22nd of August 2017. The collection consists of 30 cards.

This NFT art collection is about experimenting with digital scarcity and allowing digital artists to be paid for their work through an online art exhibition. The complete official collection contains 30 cards of different designs with each card having its own number of mints. Mint numbers range from the scarcest – card 26 with 111 mints – to the most abundant cards which have 2,000 mints.

It should be noted that due to an error by the developers, the smart contract for card 17 was deployed twice, creating an identical card known to collectors as 17B. While not a part of the ‘official’ Curio Card set, it is widely regarded by collectors as a necessary card to hold to have a complete Curio Card set.

Seven artists were part of the Curio Cards project;  Cryptograffiti, Cryptopop, Daniel Friedman, Marisol Vengas, Phneep, Robek World and Thoros of Myr (Anonymous).

The Curio card holder community is open to partnerships with new worthy art projects that express the original ethos of Curio cards. That ethos being enabling digital artists to sell their art while educating the public on how to use the emerging digital scarcity technologies.

The original developers and artists of the project maintain an active Twitter and Discord to support the community. The community is active and votes on governance issues with NFT holders being the only ones who vote.

While no new cards will ever be released, there is potential for the community to curate new art issued as an NFT since the collectors of Curio cards have a predisposition to appreciate NFT art. This could occur informally with airdrops being done to existing token holders and possibly with the community using the voting mechanism to endorse artists and their NFT art releases.

The current amount of addresses holding a partial collection and total collection are displayed here and the supply details of the cards along with the card designs are displayed in a gallery. These webpages will have relevant historical information added to them as facts are discovered. There are also plans for a website documenting the historical significance of the Curio cards and one of the original artists is rumoured to be creating an airdrop for Curio card holders.

Curio cards are recognised as the first NFT art collection to be issued on Ethereum. Curio cards pre-date both CryptoPunks and Crypto-Kitties, attracting the attention of influencers, known-holders like Gary Vaynerchuk or Daryl Morey and large collectors as a historically important NFT.

The initial collection of 1 to 10 NFTs from the total collection is about the evolution of art itself and references the reality that this collection is the first existing project to provide a digital art collection for purchase using the Ethereum block chain and the provable scarcity it provides. Only 438 full first 10 cards collections can ever exist.

While these NFTs were minted in 2017, they were not compliant ERC 721 tokens as that standard did not exist. Curio cards are referenced in the ERC 721 standard though. Thus to have these tokens available on OpenSea the original tokens are wrapped into an ERC 1155 with 1% of the sale proceeds going to the original artists. There were 29,296 original Curio Cards minted. There are currently 13,088 wrapped Curio Cards based on OpenSea’s figures. This means 44% of the minted Curio Cards have been wrapped and listed. While it is possible for the remaining 56% of the cards to be wrapped and listed it is assumed that part of this supply is lost similar to how the early supply of Bitcoin has been lost because of users not being able to access the coins.

Since the original artists directly benefit from the sale of each wrapped Curio card they are motivated to participate in the community. This may lead to value accruing to Curio card holders in the form of airdrops and access to new projects.

"The strengths of this project are the historical significance of the project and the community that is actively engaged in the project. The biggest potential downside is since this is fundamentally a value investment that the project remains undervalued for longer than anticipated. Outside of the risk of continued depressed prices there is very little operational risk to this proposal. The tokenomics are very solid with only 111 full collections possible. The BlackPool token holders and community can benefit greatly from the purchase of Curio Cards. [...] I would like to thank the readers and urge them to acquire a Curio Card even if Blackpool doesn’t end up buying. The reason being Curio Cards are a piece of history."
- Privateidentity's final comments

Following the Lab proposal, Curio cards did receive a significant amount of traction and recognition, culminating in an historic auction at Christie's : 393 ETH for the whole 30+1 cards collection.

Overview - Curio Cards

The First Art NFTs on Ethereum

Curio Cards