“There was a spark of magic around SuperRare from the beginning”
SuperRare token holders ($RARE) are in the middle of a Space Race, voting for projects that they believe will add value to the NFT community. MORROW collective are part of the Space Race and we are also collaborating with SuperRare for our Art Dubai Digital drop UAE First Immersion happening in the first week of March.
Here, Jon Perkins, co-founder of SuperRare shares his stories about the start of the platform, the highs and lows and what’s in the pipeline.
Q: When you founded SuperRare, what were your primary intentions?
A: I stared the company with my two cousins, John Crain and Charles Crain. We all have a background that threads the needle between art and technology. We were living in New York when Ethereum first launched in 2015 and we had been following the first two years of that closely; there was a ton of innovation around it. It was based on ERC20 — simple token standard — and we were following the conversation around what would later become NFTs. Essentially, in addition to currency assets we could create, register and trade digital objects — we thought it was going to be a really big deal. So, we came up with the idea to do something with creators. The intent was to help artists make money and to do something really cool and experimental with this technology. We didn’t know if it was going to work — but we saw Instagram (a purely digital space) and there was a lot of traction and economy there so we thought we would do something like that but where each asset was tradeable and had value.
Q: Was the curated aspect also part of the plan?
A: Our philosophy has always been that the artworks on SuperRare should be authentic — that was an important piece of the puzzle. But there was no market in the beginning. We just knew we didn’t want to be highbrow; we didn’t even say the word curation for the first 18 months. Although we launched with the concept of editions, we quickly killed that idea and focused on one of ones. Authenticity and originality were two of our core concepts and we were guided by that. We are always about art as opposed to corporate marketing NFTs.
Q: Tell me about the name SuperRare?
A: Another goal of the first version was to have a cool and consumer friendly app built on Ethereum. The vision was to build something as user friendly as Instagram — the name and brand had to be easy to understand. We wanted to be about art but also fun and social.
Q: How important are royalties?
A: One of the very cool things about blockchain is that it creates automatic programmatic transactions, which solves a fundamental problem of the art market: that of the starving artist continuing to starve even when their art sells for much more on the secondary market. We didn’t invent the concept of royalties, of course, but in 2017, New York was the epicentre of nerds talking about art and blockchain and there was a notion that royalties were not 100% enforceable — but we refuted that. We wanted to bake royalties into the social fabric of our market place, which bucked the trend at the time and we took criticism for it. Over time it garnered a lot of good will and now our 10% royalty has become standard across the market.
Q: What impact do you see that royalties have on the way art is traded?
A: It’s huge. It is literally life-changing amounts of money in some cases. This allows artists to think long term and have faith in building up their practice and their business. It lengthens the lifespan of creatives in the marketplace.
Q: Was SuperRare a success straight away?
A: We launched in April 2018. There were very few collectors and almost no market with most of the sales being artists collecting other artists. However, there was a spark of magic around SuperRare from the beginning. We did $90,000 of volume in the first year. That was cool but then within two years when the NFT market took off we were doing $40million a month. So, yeah, it was a very slow and sleepy start but that was a big benefit because it allowed us to build roots, build trust and build the community from the early days.
Q: Notable highs and lows?
A: Start-up life is nothing but highs and lows especially in this crazy volatile market but I think the biggest highs consistently is seeing the impact that we have on the lives of creators. In the very early days, it was cool that the artists wanted to use SuperRare but then once the market started taking off, we would get emails saying that people were paying their rent through SuperRare or people in developing economies were changing their lives. This wasn’t an elite artist community; that was kept us going through the tough years.
Q: Tell us about the launch of the $RARE token, was that about taking a more community driven approach?
A: When SuperRare started out, we were in 100% control — we were listing artists and allowing them to be creators. Although we didn’t have editorial control after that, it was the least bad way to bootstrap the market. But along the way we learned that there is a really strong demand for a curated roster of artists. So, along with the token, we launched the concept of SuperRare Spaces — mini versions of what the original model was. A SuperRare Space is a gallery with a shared smart contract where the curator can add artists and build their own brand. So, now SuperRare is becoming a higher-level platform — allowing the market to flourish. $RARE token holders curate the curators through the Space Race — it is essentially a governance token of who can wield the power of the spaces.
Q: How do you stop fraudulent activity?
A: There have been cases where our legal team have had to investigate in a similar way to traditional art market but because we have a concept of vetted artist identity including in the spaces, it is less of a problem for us.
Q: What is happening in the pipeline?
A: This year we are focused on making the tools better for artists, collectors and curators. We are working increasing the discoverability of spaces and allowing curators to create exhibitions and categorise them. It is a whole new discovery layer for collectors on SuperRare.
