Nonfungible tokens (NFT) are unique digital assets that can be used to create new auction houses like Christies and Sothebys.
Christies' March sale of a NFT of Beeples Everydays collage to $69 million was a landmark moment in digital art. It demonstrated that there is a market, at least within crypto, for prestige art NFTs. Digital artists now have a way to offer cryptographically unique versions to an ever-growing audience through these tokens.
Christies will auction off a complete set Curio Cards on Friday, Oct. 1. This set of digital collectibles is widely considered to be the first art-related nonfungible tokens (NFTs). Ethereum allows open-source development decentralized apps and NFTs via smart contracts which determine the terms of ownership.
A complete card set could be very lucrative. Noah Davis, Christies' auctioneer, stated that the conservative estimate of the auction house is between 250 and 350 Ether or $750,000 to $1 million. This auction will be the first to be called live using Ether cryptocurrency, instead of a fiat currency. Davis stated that the auction house will start listing bids in the designated cryptocurrency to try and speak the same language with the crypto community.
Curio Cards offers 30 digital trading cards with artwork from seven artists. There are currently between 111 and 2000 of each card in circulation. A complete set was sold by an anonymous seller and even includes 17b, which is a misprint. This series of cards were created by accident.
NFTs are a lucrative market that could explode. It is a speculative bubble that will eventually burst. NFTs can fundamentally alter intellectual property online and imbue trackability and scarcity with virtual goods. This vision tied to the concepts of the metaverse could lead to an immersive virtual universe that could be the future internet. NFTs could serve as a model for online property that can help fuel a new age of the internet economy. The entire history of technological gizmos will be considered important if NFTs can prove they are more than digital assets. The relics of its past will be highly valuable.
Curio Cards was actually dormant for many years before it could be sold at auction. This added to its appeal today. The now-lucrative cards had been sitting online for years before smart contracts were discovered. They were discovered by NFT archeologists who wanted to reconstruct a history of NFTs.
A NFT embryonic
Curio Cards, an online gallery that offers different digital art trading cards, was founded by Travis Uhrig and Thomas Hunt on May 9, 2017. It was started as a business venture but also to pay digital artists for their work. Quartz spoke with Uhrig, who said that he was confident that the model could be used as a Patreon model to help art patrons support digital artists they care about. They enlisted seven digital artists and created tens of thousands.
Each artist's cards are unique. For the first 10 cards, the collection begins with a simple object like an apple, an almond, an acorn and a bowl of fruits. The series later includes crypto-themed Wacky Packages. These are tongue-in-cheek mashups that combine brand logos and funny slogans. One artist creates cartoon dogs while another transforms the co-founders into action heros. The last cards in this series are the most avantgarde.
In his lot essay for Christies, Davis calls the collection a convoluted and motley array of surrealist-tinged kitsch, anti-corporate/pro-decentralization satire, slapstick cartoons, high-minded abstraction and hijinks.
He said it was like a car accident in a certain way. That's what I find charming.
The cards were sold modestly at $1 per card, with all proceeds going to artists. The project eventually failed. Hunt and Creighton went on to other projects. Uhrig provided limited technical support for cardholders, but not much else. Curio Cards was effectively put to rest after the initial sale. It is a crypto treasure. The crypto market plummeted from 2017's peak and did not recover its former heights until 2020.
Curio Cards were popularized four years after their original launch.
The archaeologists
Adam McBride describes himself as an NFT archaeologist. He has earned a reputation among crypto enthusiasts who are genuinely interested in understanding the origins of NFTs. They also want to update them to current tech standards. This was essential for Curio Cards.
Curio Cards are extremely valuable because they are so ancient. One of the oldest NFTs was created at a 2014 conference, before the Ethereum blockchain existed. When NFTs became increasingly popular in March 2021, crypto enthusiasts started looking for the oldest tokens.
McBride was among them. McBride says the NFT boom activated his treasure-hunter gene. He often spends 18 hours per day on NFT projects, enticed to help resurrect NFT project. He says it is impossible to imagine a business failing and then miraculously becoming successful four years later. These guys actually experienced it.
Some original vending machines were found by eager buyers. They had the original smart contracts that grant ownership of NFTs, but they still had active Curio Card contracts. However, the links to the website had been removed. McBride stated that he has since purchased and sold Curio Cards. He initially declined a group of hundreds cards that would have been worth approximately $250,000 today. This was an incredible and terrible mistake. He ignored it.
He says that the most important thing to him is the community and connection. He interviewed Curio Card co-founders and artists right after the rediscovery on his podcast. This allowed him to become a part of the card community. He told me that Curio Cards was the best because he made friends. They are truly special people, man.
Curio cards to auction
Complete sets of cards are now rare. Uhrig collects them but doesn't own a complete set. Only 15 people have complete Curio Card sets. Due to the rarity of Card 26, there are only 111 complete sets. McBride stated that he was involved in the facilitation of the first full-set sale this summer, which went for 100 Ether (currently equivalent to around $300,000.
Curio cards are so outdated that they don't work with the current technical standards for NFTs. Uhrig and other developers created a wrapper. This is basically a piece software that converts old tokens into a transferable token. Even those who had the cards at the time of their discovery, they had to wait for the wrapper's construction before they could trade them via peer-to-peer trading platforms such as OpenSea.
The most sought-after NFTs are selling at exorbitantly high prices, so updating the cards was essential. CryptoPunks were launched just weeks after Curio Cards 2017 and have been sold at auction for up to $11 million. A set of avatars from Bored Ape Yacht Club (a younger project) recently sold for $24.4 Million.
The value increase has allowed Uhrig to continue his work, but he is still uncomfortable about the high price of the collection. He said that he likes the idea of a card that is affordable. That's why we made prints, instead of individual pieces so that anyone could get one if they desired. It is a bit disappointing that the Curio Card costs twenty-bucks or hundreds of dollars, and the floor now runs into the thousands of dollar.
The emerging metaverse
This tension could be the key to the current state of art NFTs. They have found ways to get digital artists paid for their work, even at auctions such as Christies. However, their value as speculative instruments makes them popular.
The internet of the future could be based on NFTs. Davis presents a vision of the metaverse, an immersive future-generation internet that is composed of connected virtual worlds. This vision was enabled partly by NFTs and other Ethereum blockchain decentralized apps. In Silicon Valley, the metaverse (or Web 3.0) has been the buzzword in recent months. There is much speculation about who will build the metaverse, how it will work, what protocols and standards it will require, and what role crypto plays in it.
NFTs may be the best way to track ownership in the metaverse of virtual goods. However, NFTs are not as high-value investment vehicles as they are. They could be used to enable future tech. Currently, the value seems to be driven by speculation.
Anil Dash, the co-creator of the first NFT in 2014 with Kevin McCoy, stated in a Quartz interview this May that he believes the current overlap between investors who are interested in the art and those who care about technology is diminishingly small. However, he has little faith in the future.
He said it at a time NFT markets were down nearly by every metric. My positive interpretation is that it's returning to those who were truly interested a few months ago.
