Supernovas NFT Marketplace Offers Free Arweave Uploads

We wanted to provide NFT artists with the platform to build an empire that they completely own.

Mikaela Mäensivu, Founder, Supernovas

The newest kid on the block – decentralised social NFT marketplace Supernovas, recently announced that it will be covering all Arweave upload costs made via its platform, for uploads up to 200mb, for verified members on their platform. The 200mb cap is per upload, and since it isn’t limited per user, users would be able to make multiple uploads and benefit from a larger total amount of free allocation. On top of this, they are covering all NFT minting fees as well.

The zero cost Arweave storage fees as well as the zero cost NFT minting will be valid only while their app is in Beta, however. In order for an NFT artist to get verified on their platform they need to fill out the “Supernovas Creator Application” via the Supernovas website. 

The reason they do this is to make sure that their platform maintains a high quality and safety standard for its users. As they mention on their application form page:

“You must be selected to mint NFT’s on Supernovas. Once accepted and verified, you receive a blue checkmark and NFT minting capabilities. Every Supernovas creator is handpicked/verified to ensure authenticity.”

This seems like a good idea for a beta platform, as it combines decentralisation, where any NFT collector can join the platform at will, with a form of centralised security, so to speak, where the collector can have 100% peace of mind when buying an NFT, knowing that all creators have been verified.

The verification process for creators involves them having to send the Supernovas team “Proof Of Work”, showing themselves creating the original NFTs. Supernovas then also verifies the creators through their social media presence.

In order to connect to their platform you need to use a DeSo account. However as stated, all the NFT assets are stored on Arweave.

I was lucky enough to have a chat with Supernovas founder Mikaela Mäensivu. I asked her what made them choose Arweave over IPFS/Filecoin or some other method of storing the NFT data. This is what she had to say:

“Arweave was the clear choice over IPFS/Filecoin/really any other storage solution because of Arweave’s Permaweb technology. It was essential to us to ensure that we preserve the lifelong value of our creators’ NFTs. Therefore, we needed to make sure that our creators’ files are accessible far, far, into the future. This was made possible through Arweave! Arweave guarantees that all of our creators’ content is permanent, retrievable, and decentralised – forever. This ensures that our creators’ art, the value of their art, and their legacy live on, always. It was not a risk that we were willing to take to rely on a centralised server (as you may have seen, some platforms that are minting NFTs are keeping the image or video files centrally stored) to host files, as if that server stopped operating, art, metadata, etc. could be lost forever.”

So let’s explore how it works

Creators are able to set up an account on Supernovas and list their NFTs for sale directly through the platform.  In a method very similar to anyone familiar with the OpenSea marketplace, creators can upload their NFT assets through the platform and set all the details, like its name, description and what NFT category it falls under (e.g. Digital Art, Photography, etc.), as well as any linked unlockable content that only the buyer will be able to access.

Potential buyers are then able to browse through the available NFTs that are for sale. Once they find something they like, they can bid on it. The creator then can accept any submitted bid and the sale is complete. The NFT cost is taken from the new owner’s wallet and the NFT is transferred to them.

The Supernovas app does seem to have a very clean and minimalistic look, allowing you to focus more on the art than the menus and overall user interface.

Through the words of the founder

Founder Mikaela Mäensivu had some very interesting things to say about how today’s NFT market, as well as social media is, in a sense, broken, and how Supernovas is setting out to address this.

“Originally, when we were building Supernovas at the beginning of 2021, we wanted to set ourselves apart from other NFT marketplaces and be a platform that provide a long-term valuable solution for NFT artists and collectors.”

Firstly there was the issue of scalability and accessibility. Building it on alternative popular chains turned out to not be the solution due to its gas fees alone.

At first, the answer of how to do so was not obvious to us. We originally were going to create an Ethereum NFT marketplace, but very soon realised that was not a scalable choice, or an accessible choice for most NFT artists due to the high gas fees.

So Mikaela and her team decided on the path they needed to take. That was combining decentralised social media and the NFT market.

We started thinking that we could immediately solve a very common distribution and discovery problem by combining decentralised social media and NFTs. Decentralized social media is the future, and we look forward to being at the forefront of it.

Supernovas and DeSo

All Mikaela and her team needed to do now was find the right tools to accomplish bringing the two together.

We discovered DeSo, which very soon after we discovered the platform introduced on-chain NFTs, so us utilising DeSo as a layer one protocol was a no-brainer.

Choosing DeSo would allow them to scale to where they see Supernovas being in the future.

Currently, no blockchains on the market are equipped to handle the storage and indexing requirements of social media applications at scale. We wanted to be able to have the capacity to scale up to a billion users. DeSo also comes with several other really amazing on-chain features, like user profiles, social tipping, on-chain posts, and social tokens.

Social tokens

DeSo’s built in social token system, it seems, would make the market a fairer place for the NFT creators of today and tomorrow, allowing them to safeguard against certain price fluctuations.

Social tokens are a really interesting use case especially for NFT artists, as a percentage of revenue from NFT’s is used to burn creator coins, which effectively sets a permanent price floor on creator coin price. This means the creator coin price of NFT artists will never dip to 0, and will only continue to rise, which creates a really incredible equity instrument for NFT artists.

It’s all about the NFT artists and users at Supernovas.

We wanted to provide NFT artists with the platform to build an empire that they completely own.

Future of Supernovas and their creators

Going forward, Supernovas wants to be part of the solution tackling the risk of centralisation that creators face…

Today, artists on Instagram spend years of their life creating content and building communities of millions that they do not own or control. At any moment, they could have their profile taken down, erasing decades of work and content, and lose their source of income as these high-follower accounts typically rely on ads-based revenue. 

And they’ll do this by giving back ownership to the creators, through their decentralised platform.

We flip the script on the ads-based revenue model and through DeSo are able to provide them with a community of their own, that they can connect directly with, that can scale as large as they would like to make it – even up to a billion users.

It seems they are dedicated to changing the game and in turn making it a lot more fair for all creators. Supernovas believes in a multi chain future and are set to build based on that belief. This means that they will be adding multiple blockchain support to their platform. The first two blockchains to be integrated will be Ethereum and Solana. 

Even though Supernovas is currently in the Beta version of their app, they are planning on releasing their version 1.0 product soon. So if you want to benefit from the zero fees, you might want to check them out now before it’s too late.

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