CurioCards goes mainstream: from forgotten 2017 project to Christie's auction lot

CurioCards launched on Ethereum on May 9, 2017, as a 30-card art series — predating CryptoPunks by six weeks and predating Beeple's NFT mainstream moment by almost four years. Almost nobody noticed. Then September 2021 happened, and a project Hunt had built and watched go quiet for four years became a Christie's auction lot in five days.

The September 9, 2021 tweet:

Five days later, on September 14:

And about a month later, in October, with Hunt's signature dry register:

So, I guess we're in @Sothebys #curiocards #nft #art 2017 — @MadBitcoins, Oct 2021 — 119 favs, 32 RTs

Three tweets, three escalating validations, one consistent format: short statements of fact, screenshots or implied screenshots, no editorializing. Hunt was narrating his own vindication with the discipline of someone who had spent four years not promoting the project too hard and didn't want to break the spell now.

The CurioCards backstory

When CurioCards launched in May 2017, the NFT discourse didn't exist. ERC-721 — the Ethereum standard that would later define NFTs — wouldn't be formalized until January 2018. CryptoKitties wouldn't launch until November 2017 and cause the first major Ethereum congestion event. NFTs as a market category didn't have a name yet. CurioCards used an earlier, custom contract pattern: each of the 30 cards had its own ERC-20-like contract with a fixed supply.

The project sold quietly across 2017-2018, then went largely dormant. The original collectors held; the original contracts kept working; the cards sat on-chain doing nothing visible to the broader crypto world. By 2020, CurioCards had become a footnote — known to a small circle of early-NFT historians, ignored by everyone else. The 2021 NFT boom changed that overnight.

The Christie's moment as validation

When Christie's accepted CurioCards as a historical lot in September 2021, the auction house was making an editorial judgment about NFT art history. Curio Cards predated CryptoPunks. Curio Cards predated the broader 2017-2018 NFT moment. Christie's, by curating Curio Cards into its NFT auction calendar, was certifying that the project belonged in the historical record.

That certification had cascading effects. The Gary Vaynerchuk mention on CNN five days later was downstream of the Christie's validation. The Sotheby's inclusion the following month was downstream of both. By the end of October 2021, Curio Cards had moved from "obscure 2017 NFT project" to "foundational early-NFT artifact with major auction house representation."

What Hunt's role was

Hunt was part of the original CurioCards team. The MyCurioCards entity, the @MyCurioCards Twitter handle, the project's curation across the rediscovery period — Hunt was central to all of it. The rediscovery moment wasn't an accident; it was the result of Hunt and the Curio Cards team keeping the project's records accessible, the contracts functional, and the historical claims publicly available long enough that the NFT discourse caught up.

The September 2021 tweets are remarkable because of what they don't do. They don't trumpet "we always knew." They don't list previous milestones. They don't mention the original 2017 launch except by hashtag. They report the facts as if reporting someone else's project. The discipline of that framing — letting the receipts speak — is why the rediscovery narrative held. The 2017 receipts were public. The 2021 validations were public. Hunt's job was just to point at both.