Founding an NFT project in 2017, before the term “NFT” existed, meant two things: you were ahead of your time, and you weren’t going to make any money for four years.

After Travis Uhrig, Thomas Hunt and Rhett Creighton released their on-chain, curated art show, despite selling a few hundred cards, they failed to generate a profit, and Curio Cards went bankrupt.

Sticking digital collectibles on Ethereum was a novel idea — and, over 40,000 ETH of trading volume later, a provably lucrative one — yet, back then, during ICO mania, barely anyone understood what the blockchain future might hold.

Except, of course, for Uhrig, Hunt and Creighton, who, at this point, were deeply immersed in Bitcoin, meetup, and startup culture, among San Francisco’s buzzing art and thriving crypto hustle.

Before Curio Cards: Mad Bitcoins, crazy crypto news

In 2013, Thomas Hunt had returned from Burning Man and begun searching for career paths in the world of technology. He’d always been into computers, and kept up-to-date on tech news, reading it online when the internet was just “email and telnet” — mostly on an early website called Slashdot.

Slashdot covered Bitcoin in 2010, which was when Hunt first learned about the revolutionary “open source” cryptocurrency. But he didn’t invest as early as he would’ve liked, he tells podcaster Jake Gallen, because there were other “internet money solutions” before, which never took off; the likes of “eCash” and “liberty dollar”. Jokingly, he adds how he used PayPal for eBay, but “never really to pay his pals that much.”

So, instead of following through on the “good ideas” he had, like “buying thousands of Bitcoin or giving them out as jokes to friends”, he put Bitcoin “in the back of (his) mind.”

That is, until the price started to hit three hundred dollars in 2013, and he read about the “Cyprus” incident — a government seizure of funds from 47.5% of all bank deposits above $100,000, in order to pay back a $13-billion dollar bailout from Germany.

Suddenly, the appeal of Bitcoin clicked for Hunt; the logic of having an alternative, decentralized money. Along with the arrival of exchanges like Coinbase and Bitpay, Bitcoin’s real-world accessibility was solidified, too. So, Hunt bought a thousand dollars worth — everything he could afford — having recently become unemployed.

It was a difficult decision, because, he says, he’d “worked hard to make that money.” Although he’s lived in Las Vegas, he says he doesn’t have that “gambling gene that other people have.”

San Francisco Switch

Hunt bought Bitcoin, and then, being unemployed, decided to use what he had at home: a camera, a kind of green “sheet” he’d bought online, and parts of his leftover Burning Man costume, all of which became the foundation for a daily news show called Mad Bitcoins.

Entirely self-written, edited and produced, the show consisted of short clips, and featured the host dressed up in a Mad-Hatter costume and motorcycle goggles. In a kind of booming, broadcaster voice, Hunt delivered the daily news about Bitcoin, after noticing there was only one other show covering it: “Let’s Talk Bitcoin”, which started a few weeks earlier, in April 2013. Although he liked their show, it was much drier and more serious, kind of like the NPR show “The McLaughlin Group.” With the aim of creating something unique, Hunt’s show launched as a “five-minute news show that’s fun, maybe a little silly, but also a little serious at times.”

Hunt started “cranking out” those daily episodes, and soon got involved in the Bitcoin meetup scene, doing interviews and covering industry events. The show’s influence eventually grew, so that he created a second channel called World Crypto Network which extended beyond Bitcoin coverage, and made Hunt a recognizable industry figure.

In 2015, after Bitcoin’s price tumbled, Hunt decided it was time for everyone to “HODL” and “get jobs.” He then moved to San Francisco, where he had two short-lived stints at Bitcoin startups, one of which was Purse.io. Still active in the meetup scene, he was asked to help out at the SF Bitcoin meetup group, which is where he met Travis Uhrig.

Hunt then decided to create his own startup; he was entrepreneurial, and had read multiple books on the subject, including Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore and Zero to One by Peter Thiel. He’d also always loved baseball cards and was an avid collector (of comics and MP3s too). As an admirer of RarePepes on Counterparty, he was inspired to create a token-based art collection, but on Ethereum. This coincided with organizing an art show together with Uhrig called “Proof of Art”, which showcased Bitcoin artists to collectors at a local gallery in 2016.

Gradually, Hunt took on the marketing of the blockchain art project as Curio Cards rolled out.

Although he did his best to promote it, Curio Cards fell short of its lofty aspirations, as the collectibles failed to sell out in 2017.

But four years later, the initial vision finally succeeded, paying off in a massive way for the Bitcoin — and now NFT — creator.

Until then, Mad Bitcoins continued covering crypto, under the impression that “Curio Cards had gone to sleep, as far as [he] knew.”

This article is part one in a series on the Curio Cards Founders. It was written and edited by Curio DAO contributor OC Ripley, with help from Crypto Lurker and Clio Beruete. If you enjoy our work, please consider donating to Curio DAO.

And if you’d like to contribute creatively, find out how here, and visit the Curio Cards Discord to get to know the community.