“SuperRare” Digital Art Collector
My journey into the world of tokenized digital art started in November 2019, but I have always considered myself a collector. Whether it be wrestling figures, basketball cards, Ninja Turtles, autographs of my favorite athletes or business leaders, or paintings to line the walls of my new home, all of it felt like a form art, an asset to be valued and proud of. The thing about collecting is it is personal — you start with what you love and then you try to find the piece that’s scarce, or an artist/player that is up and coming, so it becomes more valuable over time.
It’s part of the fun to identify a piece that you can buy low and watch it increase in value over time regardless of whether you want to sell. I remember when I was a kid, I would find a rare basketball card in a pack, or get a player at a game to sign my baseball, and amongst my friends I was the only one to have it. It felt like I was the only one in the world to have it. Then I remember when Ebay came out and all of a sudden, this card or autograph that I thought I was the only one to have, there were countless others being sold online. With the internet and marketplaces, the world shrunk, and with that the idea of scarcity.
In 2013, I started learning about Bitcoin and the Blockchain. Most people were excited for a trust-less distributed currency and payment infrastructure. I too, was excited about the prospect of a currency run by programmatic rules, not the whims of a government to print when they want for whatever they want. But that’s not where my mind really went. I immediately started to think about the future of limited edition, the future of true scarcity and transparency, with certificates of authenticity that actually mean something! All ideas that I have been passionate about my whole life.
Fast forward to 2019. I moved into my new apartment in Brooklyn a month before my first baby was born. I was online shopping for art, and I came across Superrare.
What is Superrare?
SuperRare is a marketplace to collect and trade unique, single-edition digital artworks. Each artwork is authentically created by an artist in the network, and tokenized as a crypto-collectible digital item that you can own and trade.
You can think of SuperRare like Instagram meets Robinhood. A new way to interact with art, culture, and collecting on the internet!
I had been waiting for someone to build this platform since I first read about the blockchain! Additionally, I have been intrigued by the concept of digital collectibles for years. It seemed inevitable to me that the concept of collection would be transferrable to digital assets, especially in a world with 50% of the employed market being made up of millennials and gen z, these are income generating groups that grew up in a digitally connected world. So when I heard about things like CryptoKitties taking off in value, digital art was the next obvious medium.
I signed up for Superrare, easily setup my Ethereum wallet built into the Superrare platform, sent a couple eth from my Coinbase to Superrare and I was off and running. I bid on a couple pieces and was outbid quickly. Was frustrated early on. But then I finally won my first piece, Action Still Life with A-Team by Comicart. I wanted to win a piece that was horizontal so I can display it on my Samsung Frame TV. From then on I was hooked.
I found a highly engaged community of crypto artists, collectors and enthusiasts on Twitter that makes being part of Superrare that much more fun. I’ve even participated in virtual reality art shows and art galleries on sites like Cryptovoxels. And I am a coin holder of $Whale, run by one of the leading community members WhaleShark, so he can share access with the community of his portfolio of NFT’s (Non-Fungible Tokens).
I have purchased 16 Superrare, one of a kind, digital tokenized art pieces to date. I am a fanboy of some amazing digital artists like Ana Duje, Miss Al Simpson, Osiris, and Hackatao. Although hard to part with, I have sold two of my pieces, each with a 10x return on my investment. One of the coolest parts of Superrare is that even though I owned the piece and sold it to a new collector, the original artist sees a royalty every time their art is ever sold again in the future! In the traditional gallery setting, an artist only sees a profit on the first sale from the initial purchase. This couldn’t be done without the blockchain! Every piece of art has an identity, a history, an origin, years from now, not only artists and collectors will have a story, but the art itself will have its own documented journey as well. You can check out my Superrare collection on my profile.
Today, Superrare is the leading digital art marketplace, and quickly becoming a rocket-ship company! They have the metrics to back it up, over 8,123 artworks collected, $1,446,436 earned by artists, $471,243 earned in the secondary market by collectors, and they have a global community across 178 Countries. I am thrilled to be part of this budding ecosystem and can’t wait to see what the future holds.
Disclosure: I run an angel investment syndicate on AngelList called Red Beard Ventures where you can follow my deal flow and invest along side me in early stage startups like Superrare.co.
