SuperRare has been around the block a few times. Having launched the crypto art NFT platform in 2018, co-founder and CEO John Crain is continually bullish on NFTs and empowering artists. 

While SuperRare’s highly-selective curation helped set the platform apart from others, it also led to criticism from an NFT community wary of gatekeepers. With the release of the newly announced $RARE curation token, Crain and the rest of the team have begun a remarkable journey of shifting ownership of SuperRare to the community.

Decentralization isn’t just a hype-word in the NFT space. For those involved in crypto and web3, the idea of having complete control over your wealth and technology is often of paramount importance. With SuperRare being a crypto-native platform, the desire and need for decentralization has been a long time in the making.

“We’re big believers in non custodial solutions,” says Crain. “That’s kind of been part of the ethos and really just thinking about like… what does it mean to have the community more involved? To us, that [progressive decentralization] just represented like the natural next step.”

On this episode of the nft now podcast, John Crain talks about the future of SuperRare, the $RARE token, Spaces, commissions, grants and more.

Although SuperRare is among the numerous NFT marketplaces that have flourished over the past year, they base their success not on numbers, but what they can contribute to the ecosystem. It was important for them to reward their earliest artists and collectors in the form of the $RARE airdrop, which was widely celebrated by the artist community.

“We felt like there’s this really interesting opportunity to use the native $RARE token to let the community participate in governance of what people already like to talk about,” says Crain. “Which is, ‘who has access to SupeRare?”

What Crain and the SR team are creating through community ownership, independently curated storefronts and grants could help pave the way for future marketplaces to travel down the path of decentralization. Web3 affords a wealth of opportunities within the crypto ecosystem for those who want to build.

“For us with SuperRare, it’s about – how can we build a better art market? How can we support more artists?” says Crain. “How can we support more collectors and just bring art into, you know, the metaverse which is where we’re all headed.”

Be sure to hit subscribe and stream our full conversation with John Crain here.