SuperRare NFT Marketplace launches RarePass for exclusive curated art drops
SuperRare, an Ethereum-based decentralized digital art marketplace, is looking to shake up the way art is collected through the launch of its new “Genesis” RarePass.
Holders of RarePass, which SuperRare Chief Operating Officer Kyle Olney likens to a subscription-like service, will receive curated crypto art by some of the most prominent artists on the platform, all within a single transaction.
– The goal is this [RarePass] to be a trusted, curated passport offering,” Zach Yanger, senior vice president of art consulting, told CoinDesk.
Read more: SuperRare NFT Market: A Beginner’s Guide
Over a year, RarePass holders will receive a once-a-month airdrop into their crypto wallet from 12 non-fungible token (NFT) artists, including XCOPY, Pindar Van Arman, Other World, Coldie and others.
Each artist will create a series of 250 unique artworks for corresponding RarePass holders. The collections are meant to reflect the beginning of a new era for each of these artists, according to Olney.
Pindar Van Arman, an AI artist with over 20 years of experience, has been with SuperRare since its inception in 2018. He told CoinDesk that the idea of collecting art via a series of digitally exclusive airdrops is something “that hasn’t been done before.”
The new pass provides a curated list of artists with an edge and gets their work seen by a wider audience, he added.
SuperRare told CoinDesk that the participating artists were chosen by the curation team. Although the platform initially considered having community input from the SuperRare DAO, the platform decided that “for something like this, it’s the first thing out of the gate … we felt like being pretty careful about how we police this,” Olney said .
In an effort to gamify the art collecting experience, three additional artworks by the artists will be randomly distributed to selected pass holders on a monthly basis.
A 24-hour auction for the first RarePass will begin on November 15 with no set floor price.
“We don’t want SuperRare to just arbitrarily come up with a range of what we think it’s worth,” Yanger said. “We really want the community to decide the price of the pass.”
The team also hinted at future passes for thematic collections, pending the success of the initial launch.
Strengthening the crypto art market
As interest in the NFT market has cooled along with the broader crypto market, marketplaces are finding creative ways to entice new buyers and reward creators.
So far, SuperRare has generated over $280 million in sales, with more than half — $165 million — earned by the platform’s artists through royalties.
“That’s actually the innovation of NFTs,” Onley said. “That got lost in the last couple of years when everyone got really engaged in numbers going up and speculative trading.”
On SuperRare, monthly crypto art volume peaked at $37 million in October 2021, compared to just over $4 million in October 2022. Now the marketplace is looking to recover lost ground with its innovative airdrop.
“A lot of the offerings that came out last year … were way overhyped and completely underdelivered,” Yanger said, adding that SuperRare’s “Genesis” collection looks to live up to its promises and give RarePass holders “actual access to artists who created this space with a single transaction.”
