It’s SuperRare’s First Birthday!
Looking back at an incredible year– with an eye toward the future
#CryptoArt– Collecting for the Digital Generation
Our mission at SuperRare is to create a global art economy fit for the digital age.
We started this journey in fall 2017, a small team of art nerds and technology enthusiasts working out of a coffee shop in Brooklyn, NY. Our foundational thesis: collecting art should be accessible to anyone with an internet connection. You should be able to collect and trade art on your phone as easily as you can buy Apple shares on Robinhood or post a photo to Instagram.
We thought the way to achieve this was to build a platform with great UX that allows artists to issue digitally scarce artworks, following in the technological footsteps of trailblazing projects like CryptoPunks and Rare Pepe Wallet.
We spent a few months talking to friends and people in the community, and iterating through prototypes. And on April 2nd, 2018, SuperRare was officially born when our beta smart contract was launched on the Ethereum blockchain.
A SuperRare First Year
While we initially launched with an experimental mindset, we were elated to receive immediate interest from artists and collectors around the world. The first purchase was by digital art maven and collector Jason Bailey, who bought four works from Robbie Barrat– part of Barrat’s AI Generated Nude Portrait series. To us, this was a magical day, giving us a hopeful glimpse into the future.
Fast forward a year. The SuperRare community is growing exponentially. There is non-stop activity in the marketplace, and artists and collectors across the globe have found a new income stream selling and trading one of a kind digital works.
The first year’s numbers tell a compelling story:
- Total number of primary sales (artist to collector): 1,124
- Total number of secondary sales (collector to collector): 78
- Average sale price: 0.49 ETH
- Total sales volume: 554.31 ETH
- USD amount earned by artists: $91,000.00
- ETH earned by single top grossing artist: 44.78 ETH
- Number of artworks owned by biggest 🐳: 247
- Total smart contract transactions: 10,297
- Artworks created to date: 2,551
- Percentage of artworks sold: 44%
Another interesting statistic to look at is the total amount of ETH held in the SuperRare smart contract, in the form of pending bids on artworks:
Community Powered
What we’re most proud of, and continually blown away by, is the community that has come together around SuperRare. We are humbled and grateful to all of the creators, mentors, friends, peers, and advisors that have helped us along the way. Thank you!
Speaking of data and community, here is an artwork by artist HEX0x6C that beautifully visualizes all 2018 SuperRare sales as connections between the seller and the buyer.
Being a natively digital company, we’re excited about the potential for data to transform the way we discover and value creative works, and to deepen the human connections in a digital marketplace.
We’re working on a public API to make SuperRare data increasingly accessible to the community, and our core product focus is increasing discoverability on the platform, driven by data.
To the Future!
We have an aggressive and exciting roadmap for SuperRare in 2019, with the overarching goal of bringing the magic of #CryptoArt to an increasingly mainstream global audience.
At the core of this is user experience. Blockchain-integrated apps are still in their early days and have significant UX challenges to solve. We’re excited to keep tackling this problem head-on and be an industry leader in accessibility and usability as the technology matures.
Our roadmap includes:
- Improved new-user experience
- More payment options
- Mobile app
- Live auctions
- Improved social profiles & functionality
Celebrate with Us!
Live in or around NYC? Don’t have any plans on Saturday, April 20th? Come celebrate SuperRare’s first year with us! Jump in our Telegram group and ping Zack for details!
- Join the Telegram
- Follow us on Twitter & Instagram
- Submit art to the network
- Say 👋 to the team — hello@pixura.io
Thank you for a fantastic year! ❤️ Team SuperRare
