Creating an account on SuperRare is easy, all you need to do is connect your Ethereum wallet.

Unlike the typical registration processes of Web2, an email and password is not required of your account (although you will be asked to link an email to your account). Instead, your wallet address will act as the main identifier of your account, and connecting it is how you will "log in".

Please note: You cannot add multiple wallets to one SuperRare account at this time.

We support MetaMask, WalletConnect, Coinbase Wallet, Rainbow, Ledger Live (via WalletConnect), Trust Wallet, and Gnosis Safe.

If you don’t yet have a wallet, please read How to Setup a Wallet first. For first-timers, we recommend choosing MetaMask.

Please also make sure you have a browser that’s compatible with wallet extensions, like like Chrome or FireFox.

Step 1: Click “Sign in” and select the wallet provider of your choice.

Step 2: Your wallet will prompt a signature request. Click “Sign” to proceed to registration. If your wallet is not opening, you may need to click on its extension icon to open it yourself.

Step 3: Once connected, you can create a user profile: provide an email, select a username, and agree to Terms and Conditions. Please note, you can only register an email address to one SuperRare account. You can change your registered email in your User Settings at any time.

Step 4: You’re all set! You should receive an email that confirms the wallet address you registered. Feel free to spruce up your profile with an avatar, bio, and linked social media.

Step 5: Start discovering and collecting!
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You must be invited to SuperRare as an Artist in order to list your art. You will not be able to show your artwork automatically after creating a SuperRare account. See How Do I Join as an Artist?

Your journey into collecting and minting on SuperRare all starts with your wallet, which will act as your passport into Web3.

Read below to understand the basics of Ethereum wallets and learn which wallet providers are compatible with SuperRare.

What is Web3?

We’re familiar with Web2, which are currently the websites that we hear of everyday (Facebook.com, Amazon.com, etc.) With Web2, these websites hold your data to tailor your experience, making them responsible securing it as well.

Web3 is the next generation of the internet, built upon blockchain-based web technology. This technology is designed to provide more decentralization, security, privacy, and control for users, giving them the power to own and transfer their data, assets, and security.

What is a wallet?

A wallet is software that you can use to manage your art and other tokens on a blockchain. Think of a wallet as a virtual "bank account" for your digital assets. Wallets enable you to port your Web3 holdings between different marketplaces with the simple act of "connecting". Your wallet stores your private keys which give you access to your digital assets on the blockchain.

Why is a wallet required for SuperRare?

SuperRare is a non-custodial platform, which means you have full control over your funds, art, or any other tokens in your wallet at all times. As such, SuperRare will not have access or control to the contents of your wallet. Self-custodial control is a Web3 principle that's held very dearly to SuperRare's mission in empowering artists.

What is Ether (ETH)?

Ether (ETH) is a digital currency, much like Bitcoin (BTC), native to the Ethereum network blockchain. All transactions on the SuperRare platform are conducted using ETH, or other Ethereum blockchain backed currencies such as $RARE (the SuperRare governance coin).

Now that we covered some basic understanding in the ecosystem, let’s get to the fun part.

SuperRare is proud to support a number of wallets: MetaMask, WalletConnect, Ledger Live (via WalletConnect), Coinbase Wallet, Rainbow, and Gnosis Safe.

If you're new to Web3, we recommend installing MetaMask. We find that it has the most support resources available online for troubleshooting.

⚠️ Note ⚠️ Regardless of which wallet you choose, please always be wary of potential bad actors posing as wallet support on public forums like Twitter. Only take advice from agents that are clearly verified as staff from the wallet provider of your choice.

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Can I register multiple wallet addresses to one SuperRare account?

This is not an option at this time. Please see How to Create a SuperRare Account for more details on account registration.

Why cant I use Safari?
Popular providers like MetaMask are not compatible with Safari. Please consider an alternate browser that is more commonplace for crypto wallets, such as Chrome or Firefox

I'm having issues with Brave browser & MetaMask!
Brave has a default wallet that conflicts with MetaMask. If you would like to use MetaMask, please go to the Brave browser settings and disable the Brave wallet. Once you've done, that please restart your browser and try again.

I keep getting "Error Code 27"

If you encounter the Error Code 27 “Sorry we can’t sign you in at this time” you can close the window displaying the error and click on “Connect” to try again.

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Still can't sign in?

Please doublecheck that the wallet address associated with your account is the one that's active when trying to sign in.

If issues are persisting, it may be worth clearing the cache and cookies in your browser. This might help your browser and wallet speak more clearly to one another.

SuperRare is a platform to issue, collect, and trade rare digital art backed by non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the Ethereum blockchain.

Every piece of art on SuperRare is a single edition - this means each artwork is unique without duplicates.

SuperRare is built on Ethereum, a blockchain computing platform that allows anyone to securely verify art creation and ownership. On SuperRare artworks are minted directly by the original artist from their own unique wallet address with every previous bid, sale and collector being forever recorded in the token's history on the blockchain.

Our platform is built on Ethereum, a blockchain-based computing platform that allows artwork creation and ownership to be authenticated & verified.

The digital currency, or cryptocurrency, native to Ethereum is called ether, or ETH. All transactions on SuperRare use ETH.

Each user has an Ethereum account, also known as a wallet. Your wallet is where your ETH and your NFTs are stored.

When art is added to SuperRare, it is tokenized, meaning a new, unique token (the NFT) is generated by the artists that collectors can purchase. The token is linked to the artwork, and represents a permanent record of provenance and collectible ownership of the artwork.

NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) are a digital collectible – a digital object secured by cryptography and tracked on the blockchain. That’s just a fancy way of saying they’re provably scarce items that can be collected, and that hold value just like cryptocurrencies like ETH (Ether) and BTC (Bitcoin).

In order to start bidding or making offers on art, you'll need to buy some ETH and send it to your wallet address. We've created this short intro video on "How to buy CryptoArt" to further explain this.

Buying ETH with your local currency can differ from country to country, but we typically recommend Coinbase as the easiest way to purchase ETH. When considering your budget, remember you’ll need a little extra to cover the gas costs for running the blockchain transactions.

Each site will have a slightly different process - Metamask even has it's own process, if you'd like to skip the Coinbase step - but below, we'll use Coinbase as an example for the steps to buying ETH
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(you can also find these steps here on the Coinbase website)

Once you've purchased ETH on an exchange, it's time to send it to your wallet. In order to do this, you'll need to copy your public wallet address.

Within most wallets, this can be done by simply clicking on the account name. ETH addresses always start with "0x" and are what you use to register an account with SuperRare (only one ETH address can be registered per account).

Note: Be sure the address you are copying is indeed the one you have registered for your SuperRare account! You can doublecheck this by pasting the address at the end of the slash in the url https://superrare.com/. If it's the registered ETH address, your SuperRare account will come up!

In the Opera Browser app, this can be done by clicking the receive button and pressing copy.

Once you've copied your public ETH address, navigate to the Send/Receive section on the exchange you purchased your ETH.

On Coinbase, for example, this is located in the top right: paste your address, the amount of ETH you'd like to send to it, and press "Continue". Always make sure the address you're sending to matches the address of your wallet.

Once the transaction completes, you'll see the amount in your wallet. You are now funded and ready to start buying art!

Gas is a fee you pay to Ethereum miners – here's what you need to know about these fees

“Gas” refers to the fee required of any transaction done on Ethereum. Paid directly to Ethereum miners who validate these transaction and power the entire network, you can think of gas as a sort of toll fee for the Ethereum blockchain. SuperRare does not receive any of this fee, nor do we have influence over its price.

‘GWEI” is the base unit of Ethereum for gas. If you see a gas fee being estimated in GWEI, you are basically looking at a calculation of ETH – sort of like how cents are smaller fractions of a dollar.

While gas must be paid for actions such as bidding, making offers, or purchases, it is also required for other transactions that don't involve "payment", but still require a committed record to the blockchain: setting an auction, withdrawing an offer, approving a marketplace contract, etc.

Gas can get unusually expensive at times when the Ethereum network is busy. If the network has high traffic, miners are overran with requests, therefore making the price for transaction validation more competitive.

This can be pretty burdensome and often times feel limiting. Recognizing this, the Ethereum Organization have been actively working on a scalable solution for bringing gas prices down. Until then, if you want to avoid paying high prices, it is best to wait until prices come down to something you are more comfortable with.

If you want something done urgently, and you're willing to pay a little extra, you can pay more than the estimated average gas price to bump your transaction in priority. You can also submit your ideal price and wait for the transaction to be accepted, but be warned – sometimes, low-priority transactions can fail, and there is no such thing as gas refunds.

To reference the cost of gas at any given moment, you can check out sites like Ethgasstation.io or Etherscan to see recent estimations.

It's a question that comes up often, especially from people new to the NFT space: Why would I buy a piece of digital art on SuperRare when I can just download the art file for free? Am I missing something?

The question brings to life one of the biggest differences between the traditional art world and the emerging digital art world. With traditional art, when you buy a painting you have the ability to control who else sees and enjoys it. But is that what art should really be about? Since digital art lives mostly on the internet, it’s difficult to prevent others from screen-shotting or downloading the art file to view and enjoy for themselves. That being said, why would you even want to prevent this when these metrics (views, shares, downloads, etc) are also one of the best ways to value digital art.

The creation of the internet made it nearly impossible for digital artists and creators to 1) prove they created a digital work and 2) monetize these digital creations because everything could be freely downloaded. Ethereum, and the non-fungible token standard (ERC-721) has made huge strides towards solving this problem. For the first time ever, digital creators now have the ability to tokenize their digital artworks as 1 of a kind assets that can be bought, sold and traded, with the provenance of ownership and previous sales/bids being forever recorded on the blockchain.

On SuperRare, each tokenized artwork is created directly by the artist, using their cryptographic keys to create the NFT. Thus, it is the artist’s intent that the original, collectible, digital artwork is the token. Yes, anyone can download and view the image for free, but they don’t own it and they can’t gain any value from it without owning the NFT as well. As a collector you want as many people as possible to be downloading and enjoying the artworks that only you provably own because this is how the artwork gains value. Imagine if one million people around the world were featuring an artwork that only you owned on digital frames in their houses. THAT is a piece of art that has real value.

Hackatao, one of SuperRare’s most successful artist duos said it best — “Everybody sees it, only one owns it”.