The Cure for Starving Artists: NFT Royalty Fees

As the demand for digital art grows, NFTs present a useful mechanism for preserving the scarcity and verifiability of rare artworks. However, there is an even stronger value proposition provided by tokenized artwork – royalty fees.

Founded in 2017, SuperRare is a marketplace to collect and trade unique, single-edition digital artworks. Each piece on SuperRare is tokenized from a hosted image and can be displayed in a person’s profile. Artists must submit an application to join SuperRare. The platform maintains a wide variety of artwork including programmable art as well as more dynamic pieces.

For primary sales, there is a 15% commission and creators receive 85%. More importantly, SuperRare is appealing to artists because creators receive a 10% commission for all secondary sales. Secondary fees allow artists to earn passive revenue from a piece of artwork if it continues to trade on the secondary market. This feature is incredibly valuable since later sales are traditionally when an artist’s work appreciates in value. Artists often aren’t able to capitalize on their early work which makes a royalty fee appealing to many artists.

Additionally, artists typically make multiple versions of a single piece of artwork which allows them to save certain pieces of artwork if a piece becomes valuable. However, SuperRare certifies that all artworks are single editions thereby ensuring every piece – even from a single artist – is unique.

SuperRare has grown immensely over the past few years as a result of the growing interest in digital artwork combined with non-fungible token mechanisms.

The company started 2020 with $344,000 in platform sales volume which has quadrupled to over $1.6 million.