I'm going to expose SuperRare in a crypto price prediction and review they would hate for you to see, because I'm telling you, almost all of these projects in crypto are absolute rug pulls going to zero that are worthless. I've been in crypto for 11 years. I've researched thousands of altcoins, and in my experience an altcoin is an absolutely useless token until proven otherwise. Somebody asked me live on Twitch the other day to review SuperRare, so I'm going to rip into this now in real time. That's what's so cool about this: I'm going to show you how I do my own research. I look for lies. I look for BS. I look for bots. I look for a useless token. And if I find it, then we go off on it.
To me, having money in junk coins also stops you from making good investments. So I care about you all as my neighbors, my friends, and my fellow human beings. I don't want you to get ripped off by junk. That's why I put out reviews like this to try and help you every day.
The price chart tells the first story
First off, retail hates price charts like this. Even Internet Computer Protocol, which I believe is the best tech in crypto and which I talk about a lot on my main channel, has a chart like this because it was intentionally manipulated up and then dumped to pull off the rug pull narrative. So charts like this, people, retail hates them. Having a chart like this is really bad. Hardly any projects come back from a chart like this. You can see the all-time high was 20 times what the price is now, with a fully diluted valuation in the billions of dollars. This has been a huge disappointment so far, and it's going to be difficult to convince the average retail user to put money into it.
The only way to basically get this thing going again is to do some intentional, manipulated price pumps. If you're going to buy this, you'd have to count on the project cheating, using financial engineering with things like derivatives trading, longs and shorts, and leverage to get out of this hole. And it's already listed on major exchanges, so they have all the tools in place to do that. It does look like a lot of the tokens have been unlocked already, which is good. But let's get down and look at what this actually is.
"On-chain art" that isn't on-chain
It says it was founded in 2018 and is a curated marketplace for on-chain art. How much of it is actually on-chain? Because if it's not all on-chain, it's not on-chain art, it's just a big fat lie. In my understanding, Internet Computer Protocol is the only thing you can put everything on-chain with. Once you know about that, you can see how everyone else is lying. So immediately I'm suspicious that they're lying about on-chain art. What you really have is a tiny token on-chain that then points to something off-chain, which is fundamentally useless. And you have people like Elon Musk laughing at you on Joe Rogan, thinking that something like that is valuable. That's what we appear to be looking at here.
Let's check Etherscan first. Only 11,000 holders, which is an absolute dumpster fire for a project with a 90 million fully diluted market cap. Let's see the token distribution. The treasury still holds 20% of the tokens even though the unlocks are supposed to be done. Almost all of it is being held on exchanges, because you have to pay a bunch of ETH fees just to withdraw it. The top 100 holders still have 92% of the tokens. The top 500 have 98%. Junk. And it's an ERC-20 token. They did reduce the gas fees at least, but we know those can get expensive in a bull market.
Picking apart the website
Let's go to the website and see if we can figure out why this sucks. Your thesis for every coin should start with the assumption that it sucks and somebody's lying to you and trying to rip you off. Then if you see beyond a reasonable doubt that maybe there's something different here, you can get excited.
The first thing I see is that they're talking about on-chain art, but I know you cannot put this on the Ethereum blockchain directly. So the real way this is built is like this: you've got an ETH token for the project, and then the whole website is built on centralized tech. So is all the API and the price charts. So is all the backend, and all the data storage is on centralized tech. The truth is, a project like this has absolutely no decentralization, and the token is an absolutely meaningless meme coin, because the token has no legal ownership over anything on the website and no ownership by code over anything on the website. It's totally centrally controlled, and the token, to me, seems to have almost no utility.
Let's take a look at this ugly, whatever this is. Maybe somebody thinks this is beautiful. I'd hope at least the mom would think the baby is beautiful. This is ugly. That's what this is. Now look at the token. The token says "to 2," to what? It says list price 2,000. Is that what this is, 2,000? Let's go back and look at the price. So this is 2,000, is that SuperRare? No. Is this priced in Ethereum? What is this price in? ETH is 1,800, so it's not Ethereum. What is this priced in? I can't even figure out right off the bat what these prices are.
Let's see what happens if we click "buy offer." You have to connect a wallet to this, which is just more third-party crap. What is this, 2 or 2,000? Oh, that must be Ethereum, because then 2 Ethereum would be about right. So you have a massive problem. Does anybody else see the massive problem I'm about to point out? There's a 3% buyer's fee to the SuperRare DAO treasury. So the coin is a utterly useless meme coin, basically, because it doesn't own anything. And then when they sell, they're selling the art in Ethereum. Come on. The token is so useless that you can't even buy the art with the token. You have to pay Ethereum. Come on, man. That sucks. The token isn't even used to trade the art.
You have got to see through this in two seconds. The website is not owned by the token. The actual exchanging of the art is not on-chain itself. And then they're selling it in Ethereum, not even in the token. This is horrible. And this is like everything in crypto. This is pretty much how everything in crypto works.
The RARE protocol and staking
Let's look at the RARE protocol and see what it says. This is rare.xyz. Stupid-looking website, look at how small this font is. Just a dumb website. And, okay, that's nice art on here. You then have to stake RARE to earn rewards. But you have to stake it and pay ETH gas fees to stake it. You get 10% off the fees when you pay with Ethereum. So you pay Ethereum and then you get 10% off the Ethereum fees. Actually, you get 10% off if you pay with the RARE token, which is great, except you can't even see on the surface that you can pay with the RARE token.
It says they've sold hundreds of millions of dollars of art on here, which is a bunch of suckers buying useless crap. What's worse, this is the last market's hype. This is not current market hype, this is last market hype. Can we see the team behind this project? I don't see the team anywhere. So it looks to me like they've got a website. That's all they've got. Great job, you built a website and you have a useless token. The YouTube channel has one video in the last two years. They put all kinds of stuff up during the bull market, look at all this they put up, which hardly got any views, and now they're hardly putting anything up.
Bought followers versus an organic audience
I'll tell you how to avoid crypto scams: don't buy useless crap like RARE. Somebody joked that if you bought crypto art on SuperRare, now what? Honestly, you might feel like an idiot, the way I used to feel when I was poisoning myself with alcohol every day. Is that too harsh? Well, we're trying to have a little fun here. This is horrible. A YouTube channel that's mostly inactive.
Let's go look at their X account. Look at this, 300,000 followers. I'd guarantee they bought the absolute crap out of this, because that's what almost all of them do. And how relevant is this now? Oh boy. Look how relevant this is now: 600,000 followers and only 3,000 impressions on their posts. This is what happens when you buy your social media. Your engagement collapses, and I would know, because I did it. Then I deleted those accounts and started fresh ones. This is what happens when you botch your social media: you get absolute crap engagement on the vast majority of your posts. Look at my posts. I have an organic following on my X. I post, for example, hundreds of impressions with less than 10,000 followers, and then one goes out with 7,000 impressions. That's what an organic following looks like. This is what cheating and bots look like, and it doesn't even look like they're cheating anymore.
My verdict on SuperRare
The future of digital art might be bright, but in my experience the only place you can build art fully on-chain is on Internet Computer Protocol. If it's not fully on-chain, you're just selling useless crap and it's completely centralized. And sure, you can sell art, but you might as well use some centralized service where you just pay with US dollars instead of convoluting it by paying with Ethereum.
This is obvious crap. There's no way I would buy this or hold this. I'm sober over 10 years now, and this didn't exist back then, but if for some reason you bought this in a blackout or a temporary period of insanity, what I would do is dump it immediately before everybody else holding it figures out it's fundamentally worthless. If you found this useful and want more honest reviews and the way I think about crypto, that's the kind of thing I cover in my Money playlist.
I'm Jerry Banfield, a full-time YouTuber and Twitch streamer, and I filmed this live. You can schedule a call and talk with me yourself, ask me any questions you have about crypto, or come on and talk while I'm live. You can chat fully on the blockchain on my OpenChat. I talk about the one Layer 1 I actually love, Internet Computer Protocol, so almost all of my videos come back to that.