🔥_🔥 x SuperRare

Cooper Turley
Fire Eyes DAO
Published in
6 min readAug 18, 2021

Culture drives adoption.

🔥_🔥 (Fire Eyes DAO) is extremely excited to announce our collaboration with SuperRare as they debut the $RARE curation token.

In a world of pfp avatars, SuperRare maintains a prestigious sense of integrity around each and every artwork released on its platform. This commitment is something Fire Eyes aligned with initially as users, then as contributors to $RARE and in the future as curators of the SuperRare network

Fire Eyes is happy to have contributed to token design, the RAREdrop, governance strategy and the go-to market for $RARE.

In this post, we’ll dive into why we’re especially bullish on 1/1 artwork, and how curation plays a critical role in that process.

Meme credit to James Waugh

To the 4000+ artists, collectors and curators claiming $RARE today — let this mark the first page in a new chapter to redefine what a community-owned art marketplaces looks like at scale.

Why SuperRare?

With thousands of independent artists generating nearly $90M in total sales, SuperRare has solidified itself as the cornerstone of the NFT community.

Being accepted to SuperRare has intangible value, as only ~1% of all artists are whitelisted to release on the platform. This exclusivity, as well as the commitment to 1/1 releases, places a strong brand value on all artwork minted on SuperRare.

Now, with the emergence of platforms like Fractional and PartyBid, high value artworks can be democratized through fractionalization and group bidding. We believe this is a major unlock for 1/1s, and SuperRare pieces will be a significant driver in this next chapter.

The Need for Curation

While SuperRare’s selective onboarding process has largely spotlighted the best of the best, we’re thrilled to explore a path towards decentralized curation — with $RARE at the center.

Today alongside the $RARE launch, SuperRare announced Spaces: independently curated storefronts and galleries on the SuperRare platform.

Led by a community-elected operator, Spaces turn SuperRare into a multi-gallery network. We expect Spaces to be the pathway for thousands of new independent artists to release on SuperRare as each Space has the ability to curate and release whatever work they choose.

The governance process to elect these Spaces — referred to as the “Space Race” — was heavily inspired by Mirror’s Write Race. For those unfamiliar, it allows token holders to hold consistent governance votes to onboard Spaces through a token-based ranking system.

While the Space Race marks the first way that $RARE will directly influence the curation of artists on SuperRare, we believe this is just the beginning.

Over a longer time horizon, we expect $RARE to be staked towards value on the network, allowing curators to earn commissions when the work they’ve signalled to sells or collects royalties.

Today, $RARE marks the intent to democratize curation.

We plan to be active stewards in shaping that discussion.

SuperRare DAO

The most important aspect of the SuperRare DAO is the commitment to directing 100% of platform fees to a community treasury.

The conversation around where value flows is unique to every team we work with, and we want to applaud SuperRare for taking the full leap of faith and trusting the community to oversee a consistent stream of on-chain revenue in the form of commissions and fees. In August alone, this would translate to over $1M flowing into the community treasury.

As a quick refresher, 15% of all primary sales and a 3% marketplace fee are earned from sales on SuperRare. Starting today, this now includes a 5% commission on primary sales through Spaces.

We believe this sets an incredibly powerful precedent for all NFT marketplaces — namely that all ownership and value should be shared directly with those who create it.

We look forward to aiding in the growth and allocation of this treasury — specifically as a member of the genesis Governance Council.

This role is not one we take lightly, and we look forward to pioneering ways in which commissions directed to the DAO can better empower artists and collectors alike to unlock the next generation of creative value.

RAREdrop

When designing the retroactive airdrop, we wanted to ensure that everyone in the community was rewarded for the value they created.

We made sure to include a number of factors, both to reward high capital contributions (in the form of marketplace volume), and active community members who claimed artist and collectors badges. At the end of the day, we were able to strike a fair balance between empowering artists while also rewarding collectors for their actions. These culminated in a handful of actions including:

  • Fixed Artist: Fixed distribution for any verified artist on the platform that minted a SUPR NFT token.
  • Artist GMV: Distributed pro-rata to all artists based on the amount of primary and secondary sales volume in ETH terms.
  • Artist Sales Count: Distributed pro-rata to all artists based on the number of primary and secondary market transactions collectors made.
  • Artist and Collector Badges: Even distribution for all users who claimed their SuperRare Artist or Collector Badges.
  • Collector GMV: Distributed pro-rata to all collectors based on the amount of primary and secondary sales volume in ETH terms.
  • Collector Sales Count: Distributed pro-rata to all collectors based on the number of primary and secondary market transactions collectors made.

In total, the retroactive airdrop distributed 15% of all RARE to over 4,200+ members of the SuperRare community.

We believe this serves as a solid foundation for SuperRare to kickstart the governance flywheel by putting power into the hands of those who’ve earned it.

We’re eager to work directly with these recipients to shape the next chapter of SuperRare.

1/1 Season

Reflecting on the above, we believe $RARE will fuel a renewed wave of interest around 1/1 works.

In a world where speculation has driven NFT attention to quick flips and degenerative gas wars, we welcome $RARE into the world as a means to focus.

It’s evident that the creators of tomorrow will thrive on the back of growing collector bases, and we believe SuperRare is the best way to foster those relationships.

We encourage those who have made it thus far to check out our SuperRare collections, and to reach out to chat about everything from cool art to the future of decentralized curation.

Until then, we’d like to thank SuperRare for the opportunity to collaborate and look forward to showing why curation is the single important trend for crypto networks at large.

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Cooper Turley
Fire Eyes DAO

Chance favors the connected mind. Focused on building communities by making crypto cool again.