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I’ve been thinking a lot about the resurgence of trading card aesthetics in NFT art in the last year.. The format has been embraced by emerging artists like terrorism and Evil Biscuit; Beeple released trading cards for his Everydays with NODE; and Objkt published Kento, a series of trading cards featuring digital artists who mint work on their platform. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong places, but I haven’t seen much discussion of the history of trading card aesthetics in tokenized art. Some of the earliest collections from 10+ years ago were deliberately styled as trading cards: FDCARD Spells of Genesis, Rare Pepes, Bitcorn, etc. CryptoPunks and CryptoKitties maintained the idea of digital collectibles but got rid of the card aesthetic. They took the data out of the image and put it in the web interface, which continued in the design of OpenSea and other NFT marketplaces. I think it’s interesting that the trading card is returning in this moment when digital art is getting more institutionalized, via museum exhibitions, Art Basel’s Zero10, etc. It feels like an insistence on NFTs as an alternative to the art world. It’s also interesting that both in 2015-16 and 2025-26, there are examples of artists/publishers who are using the trading card format earnestly (Spells of Genesis, Kento, arguably Beeple) and others who are parodying it and/or messing with its formal structure (Rare Pepes, Evil Biscuit). Would love to hear other people’s thoughts on this topic!
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This lineage can go back even further to Hal Finney writing about cryptographic trading cards in 1993.
https://cryptoslate.com/crypto-trading-cards-how-hal-finney-thought-about-the-concept-of-nfts-over-30-years-ago/
Trading cards saved my ass during my exhibition. I sold more cards than I did art...https://phantasm.world/ Discussing with folks from this environment, I see them as collectibles collectors but not ready to branch toward art yet; some will buy more cards in terms of $ than our entry-price artwork, its perfect for chronic accumulators, pratical, somewhat liquid, rely on state on conservation, barely take any space, framing is quite affodable. It was also the occasion for me to discover the world of “convention artist”, we had Mitsuhiro Arita has a collab artist on the exibition a legend in his field, yet a complete nobody in the worl of contemporary art... I’d invite you to check out the TCG pocket, an entirely digital experience made by the Pokémon Company.
@briandroitcour I know some of the artists, but not who is behind the whole thing. The artists + their management are definitely involved.
Also Kolectiv.gg was an interesting “trading card/crypto art” market place on L2 back in 2021, had a lot of feature of OG crypto artist such like Alotta Money, mostly made as “self portrait” for some reasons
This isn’t just happening in NFT space. Contemporary100 launched recently with contemporary art trading cards you buy in packs of ten, with a shiny in each pack. Not going to lie, they are kinda tempting...
https://www.contemporary100.com/
Do you know who’s behind Contemporary100, or what their goal is? Who is their audience? Are they representing those artists? I’ve never heard of them before, but at first glance the big difference between that and the projects I mentioned is that this seems like a marketing strategy to popularize artists who work in other mediums, rather than working with trading cards as a form and/or medium. (Kento is more like this too, I suppose.)