Netgear Joins SuperRare DAO to Develop NFT Art Licensing Model

Netgear, widely known for its WiFi routers, first expanded into smart home products. Now the Web2 standby is making a play to win Web3 market share.

The company first diversified into smart home products with a 2018 acquisition of Meural canvases and smart frames. The latest plan: to use Meural digital displays to exhibit NFTs in collaboration with SuperRare collections and artists in the digital art market.

The collaboration involved joining the SuperRare DAO and buying its governance token, RARE, to be able to say something about digital art on the platform. The company declined to disclose how many tokens it bought and at what price.

The goal is to co-develop a licensing and royalty model to display non-fungible tokens of curated SuperRare collections on Meural smart frames.

The first step is for Netgear and the Meural team to submit a governance proposal to the RARE community.

John Crain, CEO of SuperRare, told Blockworks that the transition to the traditional art world in response to non-fungible tokens (NFTs) provides an ideal entry point for the firm.

“There are about 10,000 serious traditional art collectors in the world,” Crain said, referring to the art collector database Larry’s List. “It’s like a $60 billion market.”

SuperRare has a 10% artist royalty provision baked into the smart contracts to ensure their compensation from secondary sales, but, as Crain said, “We don’t really have a standard for how to do this with NFTs in the context of streaming.”

Meural has an integration with crypto wallets Coinbase and MetaMask, and a selection of dynamic, programmable NFTs in the Meural library that includes over 30,000 licensed artworks.

As for the subscription offering, Crain’s questioned how they can accurately measure what members are currently displaying on their home or office walls and then have the smart contract “do the math and allocate funds where appropriate.”

He likes to envision a set of Legos, where the most basic Lego is the collectible or piece of art, and that media item has a basic license that makes NFT collectable.

Poppy Simpson, senior product and content manager for Netgear’s Meural product line, told Blockworks that there is a parallel to be drawn with Spotify’s royalty system for real-time streaming, saying that most of the artists involved have been licensed through third parties such as publishers and record companies.

“This is a model that not only tries to align the incentives of the artists and the collectors, but it cuts out a lot of the middlemen, essentially skimming off the profits for the creator,” Simpson said.

She added that “artists are always at the forefront of technology,” and that NFTs increase the possibilities in terms of the number of people who can engage, mainly collectors

The current total market capitalization of the entire NFT market is up to $24.57 billion – up 3.4% YTD – according to data from NFTGo at the time of publication, and it’s a very new market compared to traditional fines. Art.

“These two worlds are coming together, so we’re going to see user numbers increase dramatically,” Crain said.

Capitalizing on the cultural collision, SuperRare has opened a pop-up gallery in downtown New York through August 28, featuring a rotating program of five Meural-framed NFT exhibitions.

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