First Ever SR Token #1, by Artist Robbie Barrat Just Sold for 110K.
SuperRare launched almost 3 years ago with a dream of building a large-scale global art market for digital creators and to help give the power of the internet back to the creators that are making the internet so successful.
The creation of the internet was a mixed blessing for digital creators. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram enabled creators to share their work to a wider audience and gain massive global followings, but because everything on the internet could be freely downloaded it was nearly impossible to monetize these creations beyond gaining likes and followers. SuperRare founders John Crain, Charles Crain and Jonathan Perkins realized that Ethereum and the non-fungible token standard (ERC-721) could be used to work towards solving this problem, and thus SuperRare was born.
Launched in April 2018, SuperRare enabled digital creators for the first time ever to have the ability to tokenize their digital artworks as 1 of a kind assets that could be bought, sold and traded, with the provenance of ownership and previous sales/bids being forever recorded on the blockchain.
SuperRare also introduced the concept of artist royalties which are built into the smart contract and enable artists to receive a 10% royalty every time their work resells on the secondary market. For most of history artists haven’t gained fame or fortune until after their deaths. Artists earned the price their work sold for initially regardless of whether it went on to sell for many millions in the future. By building an automatic 10% royalty into the SuperRare smart contract, artists will now be able to earn a passive/ongoing income on the future success of their works.
The first ever artworks to be tokenized on SuperRare were by artist Robbie Barrat. In 2018 at age 18 Barrat combined new research from a paper on a machine learning framework called GANs (https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.
Later in 2018, Barrat made worldwide art news when the code he open sourced on github was used by another artist collective to create Portrait of Edmond Belamy, which went on to sell for $432,500 as the first ever AI generated artwork sold at a Christie’s auction with no credit to Robbie at the time.
Since then Barrat’s 1st artwork AI Generated Nude Portrait #1 has resold twice:
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First to collector curiousnfts for 75 ETH ($13,265 at the time) about a year ago. Barrat received a 7.5 ETH royalty worth about $1,326 at the time – 653% higher than the initial sale price
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Last week it resold to new collector blombos for 100ETH ($112,717). Barrat received a 10 ETH royalty worth about $11,271 at the time – 6303% higher than initial sale price
Robbie also received similar sized royalties on these 2 sales last week:
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Sold for 80 ETH ($95,834 at the time)
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Artist Royalty: 8 ETH ($9,583 at the time)
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Original Sale Price: $176
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Sold for 100 ETH ($119,064 at the time)
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Artist Royalty: 10 ETH ($11,906 at the time)
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Original Sale Price: $693
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In total Robbie earned 28 ETH (worth today over $31,000) in royalties from 3 secondary sales of artworks he originally sold for a total of $945 in 2018.
The internet art market has arrived.
TweetAbout the Author
Dr. Jerry Doby Editor-in-Chief of The Hype Magazine, Media and SEO Consultant, Journalist, Ph.D. and retired combat vet. 2023 recipient of The President's Lifetime Achievement Award. Partner at THM Media Group. Member of the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture, the United States Press Agency and ForbesBLK.
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