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 “Genesis” RarePass.

Holders of the RarePass, which SuperRare Labs Chief Operating Officer Kyle Olney compares 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 for this [RarePass] to be a trusted, curated pass offering,” Zack Yanger, senior vice president of art advisory at SuperRare Labs, told CoinDesk.

Read more: SuperRare NFT Market: A Beginner’s Guide

Over one year, RarePass holders will receive an airdrop once a month 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 pieces of art for corresponding RarePass holders. The collections are intended 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.

Olney told CoinDesk that the participating artists were chosen by its curation team. Although the platform initially considered having community input from the SuperRare DAO, the platform decided that “for something like this that’s the first go out of the gate … we felt like being pretty careful about how we control this,” Olney said.

In an effort to gamify the art collecting experience, an additional three artworks by 12 other artists will be distributed randomly to select pass holders on a monthly basis, totaling to 24 artists.

A 24-hour auction for the first RarePass will begin on Nov. 15 without a set floor price.

“We don’t want SuperRare to just arbitrarily come up with a number of what we think it’s worth,” Yanger said. “We really want the community to decide the pricing of the pass.”

The team also hinted at future passes for thematic collections, pending the success of the initial launch.

Boosting the crypto art market

As interest in the NFT market has cooled off with the broader crypto market, marketplaces are finding creative ways to entice new buyers and reward creators.

So far, SuperRare has transacted upwards of $280 million in sales, with more than half – $165 million – being earned by the platform’s artists through royalties, including $10 million in secondary sale royalties.

“That’s actually the innovation of NFTs,” Onley said. “It has gotten lost in the last couple of years when everybody became really engaged in numbers going up and speculative trading.”

On SuperRare, monthly crypto art volume hit a peak of $37 million in October 2021, compared to just over $4 million in October 2022. Now, the marketplace is looking to salvage 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 that created this space with a single transaction.”