Curio Cards wasn’t just early — it was influential.

In 2017, before the term “NFT” existed, Travis Uhrig, Thomas Hunt and Rhett Creighton delivered a set of innovations only a small crowd of crypto enthusiasts were able to ponder.

Despite the project initially going bankrupt, these choices earned recognition, even if only within a developing Web3 industry. This resulted in Curio Cards’ being referenced in the original ERC-721 Standard — the set of rules all modern NFTs are based on today.

Whether technical, creative or commercial, here are a few Curio Cards innovations common in the current NFT art era: IPFS storage, minting from a contract, and on-chain artist support.

IPFS secured

Go down the NFT project rabbit hole, and you’ll soon find most collections rely on the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) for storage. IPFS enables NFT data — the line of code linked to the digital asset — to be stored in a decentralized manner.

How?

IPFS nodes are hosted by users, which broadcast access to the data via the IPFS network. All that’s needed to retrieve any data is a “content identifier” (CID).

This ensures assets can be accessed at any time, provided the IPFS nodes are up (if you have thousands of nodes, the chances are good, barring a Carrington Event or similar).

Most modern NFT projects utilize IPFS as their storage solution. Historical projects like CryptoKitties and Mooncats too. When Curio Cards decided to follow this path, IPFS was rarely talked about as a solution for blockchain-based storage — partly, because there weren’t many on-chain digital assets that needed storing.

While it’s also possible to store NFT files on the blockchain directly, such as the recent Bitcoin Ordinals which present themselves as “inscriptions”, this is a network-intensive approach that some fear may prove expensive. It’s perhaps more permanent, though, which is why it made news when Ethereum project CryptoPunks went fully on-chain in August 2021.

“Vending machines” — minting from contract

Curio Cards was the first project to enable buyers to interact directly with smart contracts on Ethereum to “purchase” NFTs. This happened at launch; an announcement was made as soon as the contract went live, and waiting buyers signed a transaction to receive their digital tokens. Today, this is called minting, and is integral to every NFT collection hitting the market.

While art such as RarePepes traded on the Counterparty platform in 2016, these were all “over-the-counter” trades; peer-to-peer, essentially. Traders could use the RarePepe wallet developed by Joe Looney to hold and view their tokens, or sell them to interested parties.

But the process of minting an NFT on launch first arrived with Curio Cards a year later. With RarePepes, for instance, cards were distributed to the artists, who could sell them via Counterparty on Bitcoin. “Minting” art was unique to Ethereum; an idea that perhaps took hold in 2018 with the buying frenzy around CryptoKitties; cartoon cats “bred” on-chain.

Curio Cards artist support

Promotion and partnership

Though RarePepes aimed to support artists by giving them a platform to sell their work, that’s where the support ended. In championing decentralization, each artist was responsible for their own success (until the project eventually grew and attracted interest purely based on its name).

Curio Cards worked alongside the artists to promote them. Each artist was given a specific set (a series) in one grand 30-Card art show. One collection was created, and each artist would benefit from the sales of their cards — sales overseen, and earnings paid out, by the Curio Cards team.

This layer of collaboration has taken the form of partnerships between brands and creators too. Nike, Dolce & Gabbana and Disney are just a few to have jumped into the NFT scene. Whether partnering with successful artists or helping launch new talent, collaboration and emphasizing the creators involved has become a central feature of new NFT collections.

Royalty pledge

Amid the on-rush of 2021 and 2022 NFTs, most projects chose to work closely with artists, offering them exposure while ensuring they get paid via OpenSea (or other marketplace) creator royalties. This is also partly due to the mainstream attention NFTs attracted, which gave projects room to spotlight their creators (often on Twitter Spaces). With increased attention came a royalty rush too, resulting in 10% creator fees (and more) for highly hyped releases like DeGods, a collection on the Solana blockchain. Interestingly, DeGods opted to dial back their royalties to 0%, prompting others to do the same, including OpenSea which temporarily slashed fees just last week.

While Curio Cards holders voted to implement a 1% royalty in 2021 — an outlier among all contemporaries, which possibly contributed to more volume — the idea of getting artists paid for their work was certainly intrinsic to the project’s foundation (even if it was inspired by Pepes, but achieved, ultimately, through Ethereum’s smart contracts).

One hundred percent of the original Curio Cards sales went to the artists, and one hundred percent of the royalty goes to them now.

Historically noteworthy

Being first doesn’t guarantee influence. Even though Curio Cards was early, it didn’t spawn countless imitation projects, like the profile picture collections, CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club. Yet, Curio Cards made decisions that were innovative, and, even if they might not have been influential early on, were influential enough within the Ethereum community to be noticed.

The founders’ vision was vindicated — not just financially, but in the development of an entire new art era and on-going support of Curio Cards artists.

Curio Cards is an important, history-making collection in its own right; a journey that began with choices and design only few understood, but later, many projects adopted.

Those early decisions are now foundational to modern NFT art.