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Netgear is using its Meural digital displays to show off non-fungible token (NFT) art, and now Netgear is teaming up with NFT art marketplace SuperRare.
Netgear will join the SuperRare DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) to help develop a licensing and royalty model for displaying NFTs on digital displays. The licensing model, which supports the showcasing of curated SuperRare collections on the Meural platform, strengthens a vision both companies share to create new ways to interact with digital art, culture and collections.
The acquisition of $RARE tokens and participation in the SuperRare DAO signals the start of a new era for Netgear and a doubling down on its commitment to creating a new model for digital art, the company said. Its involvement in the SuperRare DAO is designed to shape the future of decentralized curation, community organizing and artist empowerment.
Empowering artists
Meural by Netgear developed on the belief that thoughtful use of technology could transform access and discovery of visual art and make it part of people’s daily lives.
The platform consists of a WiFi-connected digital canvas, Meural art Library (the world’s largest streaming library of art and photography), smartphone app and web portal. It was developed to engage new audiences in digital art while creating additional revenue streams for creators.
While they have been controversial and the prices have cratered lately, Netgear said that NFTs are now enabling the promise of the digital art world.
“By introducing digital scarcity to art and collectibles, NFTs and blockchain technology have granted new economic and creative powers to digital artists,” said Poppy Simpson, senior product and content manager for Netgear’s Meural product line. “Netgear supports this exciting development, and is committed to working alongside creators, collectors and enthusiasts to forge a licensing model that reflects their interests.”
Simpson added, “Working with SuperRare Labs to develop a licensing framework that the SuperRare
community can support feels like a spiritual alignment between our brands to build a broader,
more diverse art and curation eco-system.”
Inspirations
Meural has been part of the Netgear portfolio of smart home products since 2018 and helps
advance the company’s vision of a fully connected world. The premium digital canvas can
deliver a realistic art viewing experience that can be controlled via gesture, desktop, mobile app,
or voice (Amazon Alexa).
The Meural Canvas lets you to interact with their art daily via its library of over 30,000 licensed artworks and acts as the best media distribution platform for displaying visual arts. Most NFTs aren’t easy to show off, but the Meural platform frees NFT collections from the confines of digital wallets and allows owners to enjoy their purchased pieces on the walls of their homes or offices, Netgear said.
Designed as a marketplace to collect and trade unique, single-edition digital artworks, SuperRare ensures that each artwork is authentically created by an artist in its network and tokenized as a crypto-collectible digital item that consumers can own and trade.
Netgear integrated Meural with crypto wallets Coinbase and MetaMask, and it partnered with Async Art to add dynamic, programmable NFTs to the Meural library.
Meural will also be featured in SuperRare’s pop-up gallery in New York’s SoHo neighborhood, bringing together well-known NFT artists and the larger CryptoArt community. Open through August 28, the SuperRare Gallery features a rotating program of five NFT exhibitions, some organized by the company’s in-house curatorial team, others by guest curators. Additionally, Meural will showcase approximately 100 works, curated by SuperRare, on the Meural platform as the new licensing model is worked out.
Founded in 2018, SuperRare is a curated marketplace for digital art, built on the Ethereum blockchain. From the beginning, SuperRare has more than $300 million worth of NFT artworks bought and sold on the platform to date and more than $150 million has gone directly to artists.
In other news, Netgear said Meural canvases have added support for the Solana blockchain’s self-custody wallet, Phantom. Starting next month, collectors will be able to connect their Phantom wallet to display their NFTs on Meural, a digital canvas designed to showcase digital works in the same way as classical art.
The NFT pricing collapse and the crypto winter
I asked Netgear what it thinks of the NFT pricing downturn and crypto winter.
“The general trend for the blue-chip art project is a decorrelation from crypto price. It is not linked to the same volatility,” said Simpson in an email to GamesBeat. “We saw massive flooding of the market in Q4 which has led to what we see now – the market working itself out. That’s not as surprising given the rapid growth and adoption of the NFT market. Digital creators have been creating art for a very long time and that won’t change. What NFTs have done is provided a technology to allow these artists to sell collectibles by introducing the concept with scarcity.”
Netgear believes it’s clarifying moment for the market and not one that hurts it. But it’s also still a market in need of evolution in terms of audience and adoption, Simpson said.
As for the crypto integration, Simpson said, “We’ve been in stealth mode and have seen an extremely healthy take-up over the last two quarters. Given the number of partnerships, we are leveraging we expect this to continue to grow as we build out support for NFT collectors and content enthusiasts and fans.”
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