Currently, the NFT Art Market is facing challenges around discovery and curation of NFT Artwork.

With hundreds of NFT Art marketplaces and tens of thousands of new artworks minted every day, the NFT market has become both fragmented and flooded. As a result, a few problems at the micro and macro levels of the NFT Art market have manifested.

At the micro level, emerging NFT talent, including artists and curators, face significant discovery challenges. Emerging artists, who are striving to have their work discovered, face high competition against more-established artists and an ever-increasing supply of new NFTs listed on the market. Emerging curators, who are aiming to build their reputation as distinguished tastemakers, often face a price barrier due to the high costs of top quality NFT artworks.

At the macro level, the NFT Art ecosystem faces a significant curation challenge. Currently, the market’s curation system relies heavily on centralized curation teams to oversee and curate the entire market of artworks. While this centralized approach worked during the earliest stages of the market, it can no longer sustainably manage the entire curation process due to the ever-expanding scale of the NFT Art market.

As the NFT Art market continues to expand, these issues of discovery and curation call for the addition of a more decentralized, scalable approach to curation and discovery into the NFT ecosystem.

This is what Rare Protocol is building - an open curation protocol for NFTs.

Launched in 2023 by SuperRare Labs, Rare Protocol aims to solve the discovery and curation challenges in NFTs by creating an open curation protocol for NFTs.

Rare Protocol introduces a novel staking mechanism called “curation staking”. Curation Staking brings the elements of discovery, curation, and reputation all onchain by incentivizing artists, collectors, and curators to signal their support for others.

In exchange for locking up $RARE tokens in a pool associated with a collector, artist, or curator via an ETH address, the staker receives rewards from future sales of the artist, collector, or curator they are staking on. The greater the amount of $RARE tokens an individual stakes to the pool, the larger their percentage ownership in that pool becomes, directly increasing the proportion of rewards.

A key component of curation staking on Rare Protocol is that individuals are incentivized to be early stakers on lesser-known artists, curators, and collectors rather than staking on more-established talent. This type of staking rewards mechanism provides emerging talent with a greater opportunity of having their work discovered in the NFT art market.

In addition to earning staking rewards, the curation staking activity of each individual on Rare Protocol contributes to an onchain reputation profile known as a ‘Curated List’. This list represents all the artists, collectors, and curators that an individual has staked on.

Curated Lists enable individuals to explore the curated tastes of the NFT market, while showcasing the artists, collectors, and curators they support. This feature serves as a verification tool by highlighting the credibility and actions of participants in the NFT market.

Furthermore, through Curation Staking and Curated Lists, emerging talent in the NFT market can build their reputation without the need for significant financial investment in high-quality NFT artworks. By staking $RARE tokens on artists, they can gradually develop their own onchain reputation profile, facilitating their growth and recognition in the NFT ecosystem.

At the macro level of Rare Protocol, all the curation staking activity on the network forms a platform-agnostic, peer-to-peer social graph of the NFT market. As more curation staking activity occurs on the network, this social graph grows into a digital registry of the entire NFT market.

This social graph serves as a powerful discovery tool within the NFT ecosystem, enabling collectors, artists, and curators to gain deep insights more efficiently. It eliminates the need to simultaneously navigate multiple marketplaces (e.g. OpenSea, SuperRare, etc.) and social networks (e.g. Twitter, Instagram, etc.), streamlining the process of developing market insights.

As we envision the future of the NFT Art ecosystem, Rare Protocol introduces an innovative approach to curation and discovery in the NFT Art market. It offers the ecosystem a scalable, decentralized approach to curation and enhances how artists, artwork, and talent are discovered in the ecosystem.

Rare Protocol’s curation staking system has the potential to bring the elements of reputation, discovery, and curation all onchain, and level the playing field for emerging talents in the NFT Art market by incentivizing discovery of emerging artists and removing the cost barrier for emerging curators.

Furthermore, Rare Protocol’s platform-agnostic, peer-to-peer social graph, has the potential to significantly interconnect the NFT Art ecosystem by forming a decentralized network that links artists, collectors, and curators. This social graph provides the market with a comprehensive, cross-platform discovery tool, empowering artists, collectors, and curators to discover new artwork, talent, and to gain unique insights in the NFT market.

As of January 2024, Rare Protocol is live on Ethereum Mainnet with over 18.6 million $RARE staked on the network, and has distributed over 99K in $RARE rewards from curation staking. Rare Protocol plans to deploy L2 Livenet in March 2024.