'Older than CryptoPunks': the multi-year campaign that quietly succeeded

CurioCards launched on Ethereum on May 9, 2017. CryptoPunks launched on June 23, 2017. The gap is six weeks. Across 2022-2024, @MadBitcoins ran a quiet, persistent campaign to establish that six-week priority as settled historical fact. The campaign succeeded by accumulation.

The April 2024 tweet that crystallized the late phase:

[Curio Cards] older than CryptoPunks — @MadBitcoins, Apr 2024 — 60 favs, 11 RTs

The campaign wasn't a single big tweet. It was hundreds of small ones across the pivot era, each adding a verifiable piece of evidence to the priority claim. Wikipedia citations. Museum placements. Conference appearances. Academic references. Each cited the priority. Each became a new piece of public record.

Why the priority claim mattered

NFT history, as a field, was actively being canonized across 2022-2024. The first wave of NFT-history articles, academic papers, museum surveys, and reference works were being written. Each of these works needed to decide what counted as foundational. The decisions made in this canonization wave would set the historical record for decades.

The "first NFT" claim is contested and somewhat undefinable — Counterparty assets from 2014, Rare Pepes from 2016, and other on-chain pre-NFT projects all have arguments. But the "first ERC-721-style NFT art project" claim was more tractable, and CurioCards' May 9, 2017 launch had a credible argument for that title. CryptoPunks (June 23, 2017) and CryptoKitties (November 2017) had both gotten substantially more attention. Hunt's campaign was to insist that the May/June timing be accurately reflected.

The campaign's tactics

Three tactics did the work. First: ensure on-chain receipts were public. The CurioCards launch transactions, original holders, and contract addresses were verifiable on Ethereum. Anyone fact-checking the priority claim could do so in minutes. Second: get the priority claim into citable sources. Wikipedia was the obvious target. Museum placements that included the launch date were another. Academic papers were a slower target but the most durable. Third: be patient. The campaign ran across years. There was no single moment when it was won. The claim accreted into accepted fact through repetition and verification.

Each @MadBitcoins tweet in the series did a small part of this work. The Wikipedia citation tweets (February 2022, April 2024) were notifications that the priority claim had been recorded in the major reference source. The Moco Museum placement tweet (July 2023) noted that a major museum had included CurioCards in its NFT history exhibition. The "older than CryptoPunks" tweets directly stated the priority claim with the audience as witness.

Why this matters as a model

The "older than CryptoPunks" campaign is a methodological case study in long-arc reputation work for a creative project. Most projects try to win priority through PR pushes, big-bang announcements, or media campaigns. Hunt won it through years of small, verifiable tweets that compounded into a citation graph. The tactics required: maintained on-chain receipts, patience, repetition, and a recurring small-format tweet genre that the audience accepted as normal.

By 2024, the campaign had succeeded. CurioCards' priority over CryptoPunks was settled in Wikipedia, in museum placements, in NFT-history surveys. The 60/11 engagement on the April 2024 "older than CryptoPunks" tweet wasn't a viral spike — it was the audience nodding at a fact that had become uncontroversial.

The campaign also serves as a defense of long-running Twitter accounts as historical infrastructure. The CurioCards priority claim couldn't have been won by a single dramatic intervention. It needed a multi-year low-stakes presence pushing the claim into reference sources. @MadBitcoins' continuous operation across 2017-2024 made the campaign possible. A shorter-lived account couldn't have done this work.

The cumulative pivot-era CurioCards series is one of the cleanest cases in the archive of how Twitter, used by a patient operator, can do historical record-shaping work that other media can't.