Curios Sunsets NFT and Web3 Tools to Focus Fully on Direct Sales for Creators

Curios is sunsetting its NFT and Web3 tools, committing all of its resources to a single mission: making Curios the easiest way for content creators to sell directly to fans across every format they produce.

Curios is not a Web3 or NFT platform, and by many definitions never was. It is a creator sales and distribution platform. Even in its earliest days, the mission was making it easy for creators and their fans to connect and transact. As the company matured, it built an ecosystem around the four things every creator needs: publish, promote, sell, and distribute. Curios Studio now addresses all four, letting creators list content for sale in any format, print or digital, create demand for their work, make sales, and rely on built-in distribution.

"Creators told us what they actually need, and it isn't blockchain infrastructure," said Grant Powell, CEO. "They need to earn more money and know who their customers are. Those are the fundamental tenets of selling direct. Creators should spend their time creating instead of filing sales tax, providing customer support, fulfilling orders, and handling other operational burdens. At Curios, we handle all of this for them."

One platform for every format

Curios supports the full range of formats premium content creators sell, in any combination. Authors can sell ebooks, audiobooks, paperbacks, hardcovers, special editions, print-on-demand books, signed copies, bundles, and multi-format combinations. Musicians can sell albums, vinyl, and merchandise alongside digital downloads. Comedians can sell specials as video, audio, or both. Filmmakers and video production companies can sell rentals, purchases, and pre-sales. Any creator can bundle formats together, such as an ebook plus video plus signed hardcover, or an album plus vinyl plus a tour merchandise pack, in a single transaction.

Every creator gets a dedicated creator page that works as a direct storefront from the moment they publish. Creators can send their audience to a single link showing every format and bundle they offer, without building or hosting a website of their own. Those pages live inside the Curios Marketplace, where fans can discover new creators and where existing audiences land when a creator points them to their store.

Digital content is delivered instantly through the Curios mobile app, which supports ebooks, audiobooks, music, and video. Physical fulfillment runs through discounted shipping partner integrations, print-on-demand partners, and warehouse and 3PL solutions, so creators can sell physical goods without building their own logistics stack.

Creators keep 100% and own the customer relationship

On Curios, creators keep 100% of every sale. There are no royalty splits, no commission cuts, and no platform tax on revenue. Creators also receive direct access to their customers' contact information through the reporting dashboard, with full GDPR compliance and the ability for buyers to opt out at any time. A creator's audience belongs to the creator, not the platform, which means they can market their next release to a list of confirmed customers rather than starting from scratch.

That is the difference between selling on Curios and selling through a third-party retailer. On most platforms, creators give up a meaningful share of every sale and never learn who bought their work. On Curios, the revenue and the customer relationship both stay with the creator.

Curios absorbs the administrative burden

The reason most creators don't sell direct is the operational weight that comes with it: tax compliance across jurisdictions, customer support, fraud and chargeback disputes, content delivery infrastructure, refunds, and the legal exposure of being a merchant. Curios takes all of that off the creator's plate.

Curios is the merchant of record on every transaction, handling sales tax collection, remittance, and compliance globally. It manages customer support inquiries, content delivery, fraud prevention, and chargeback disputes. Payouts are fast and predictable.

The platform is permissionless and self-service. Creators can publish, price, promote, and distribute their work without approvals or gatekeepers, and they retain full ownership of their work and full control over how, when, and to whom they sell it.

"Direct sales has always been the better economic model for creators, but the administrative costs made it impractical for most people," Powell said. "We've spent the last two years building the infrastructure that removes that cost. The result is a platform where any creator can instantly launch a real direct-sales business, keep every dollar they earn, and own their audience for life."

Retiring the NFT and Web3 tools lets Curios concentrate fully on the features creators are asking for: better discovery within the marketplace, stronger recommendation tools, external partner networks, promotional asset tools, and continued investment in direct-to-fan commerce across every format. For now, the company's full attention is on making direct sales the default way premium content gets bought and sold.