Writing on Curio Cards for the "On NFT" book

Curio Cards is the first art NFT project on Ethereum, launched as a permanent online art show gallery on May 9, 2017. Curio Cards used Ethereum to establish a new model for the creation and ownership of digital artwork. The Curio Cards approach was to create a unique set of rare collectible art, with contributions from seven artists with different styles and backgrounds. In doing so, Curio Cards pioneered a new way for artists to receive value for their work, interact with collectors, and build a broader community. The official set of Curio Cards contains 30 pieces of art (also, there is a misprint of 17, titled 17b). The seven artists who created the art for Curio Cards (and the cards they created) are Phneep (1–10, 14–16, 20), Cryptograffiti (11–13), Cryptopop (17–19), Robek World (21–23), Daniel Friedman (24–26), Max Infeld aka Marisol Vengas (27–29), and Thoros of Myr (30). Various media were used in the creation of Curio Cards, including digital art, printmaking, pen and paper, mixed media, and animation. The NFTs 24–29 contain perhaps the first physical artworks represented on the Ethereum blockchain, and 23 may be the first animated GIF on the Ethereum blockchain. For further contextualization of each artist, we encourage readers and art historians to explore the varied projects that each artist has contributed to. Curio Cards are referenced in the original ERC-721 Non-Fungible Token Standard, and introduced several other computational features that were novel for the time. The Curio Cards project thus reflects a developmental advance in art itself, as well as in the social and computational aspects of art.

Overview source: Curated paper metadata.