Summer is over, but friends are forever. After two months of our private alpha for RARA NFT holders (The 🌞 Summer of RA!), it’s time to open our social curation protocol to more friends. Welcome to the next phase - Let’s Curate! 🫂 Friends.

🫂 Friends of RARA

Starting today, anyone can become a 🫂 Friend of RARA to access on-chain reactions and comments for curated NFTs.

Simply connect your wallet to app.rara.social, add your Twitter handle, and tweet the signed message to become a 🫂 Friend.

With heat records breaking in cities around the world, RARA launched the 🌞 Summer of RA! campaign to set records for decentralized social curation.

Over 100 NFTs curated later, we discovered something pretty special. Here’s a recap.

It’s time, NFT curators + fans. RARA’s Social Curation Protocol for NFTs is launching on Saturday, July 23rd with the Summer of RA!, an exclusive alpha for our most loyal community members. Welcome friends to the 🌞 Summer of RA!

Genesis Curation Launch Party. Saturday, July 23rd at 11:30AM ET

Location. RARA’s discord (RARA.house).

With the Genesis Reaction Registry now closed and the genesis curations only days away (July 23rd), it’s a great time to talk about who earns with RARA’s social curation protocol.

In short, NFT creators, collectors, and fans can all make money with RARA.

• Reactions. Creators and Collectors of NFTs registered as reactions earn $USDC.
• Curated NFTs. Creators and Collectors of NFTs curated with reactions earn Curation Tokens (redeemable in $USDC).
• Fans and Curators. Fans and Curators earn Curation Tokens (priced in $USDC)

Creators and collectors earn royalties when their NFTs are used as a reaction or receive reactions. It’s kind of like if you earned a little bit of money for making emojis or received emojis on your Instagram posts.

Studies suggest it’s easier to create memories when more than one of our five senses are combined in an activity. In the age of the Internet where our eyes are generally the only players at hand, creating memories is hard. Interestingly, social media solves this problem - the creation and storage of digital memory. Can’t remember what you did Sunday? Check Instagram - they’ll store your memories for ✌️ free ✌️.

But, we all know that free lunch is not so free. We pay for social memory storage with our time while being spoon-fed whatever the algorithm wants [cough: ads]. Need to show off your Instagram memories on Twitter or better yet maybe make money with them? Good luck with that.

Thankfully Web3 and all its cool tools are shaking up the digital memory space. Best-in-class NFTs store creators’ work online while also introducing the idea of portable assets that anyone can buy or sell.

But, what about all the conversations around the NFTs? Besides the price, do we know what the NFTs fans think about a given NFT? Today, NFT conversations (and their digital memories) are - you guessed it - stored primarily on Twitter.

Hello Curators.

The Social Curation Protocol is officially open-sourced. In an effort to expand the definition of curators beyond the few to any and all, we are publishing our first article for developers, builders, and savvy curators alike. From curated music playlists to curation bots feeding galleries in the metaverse, let’s rethink how the Internet’s most valuable assets are curated and presented to the world. We hope this resource starts the conversation.

What is RARA?

RARA is a social curation protocol, empowering the crowd to help find, promote, and add social context to the best NFTs. With the current state of NFTs, finding and organizing content is a hard problem to solve. RARA is set to change that by introducing curation incentives.

Updated (June 29th, 2022) - This post has been updated to reflect the the Genesis Reaction Registry is being extended for overtime until Thursday, July 14th, 2022.

Gm creators + collectors, today’s a new day for NFT royalties.

Announcing the Genesis Reaction Registry, where artists and collectors register their NFTs to sell reaction, the Web3 equivalent of a like, emoji, or meme. Add your NFT to the Genesis Reaction Registry by June 30th, 2022 July 14, 2022 to sell reaction tokens to fans curating NFTs at launch.

Register at register.rara.social ↗.

Updated (June 30, 2022) - This post has been updated to reflect the Genesis Reaction Registry being extended until July 14, 2022.

Updated (May 23, 2022) - This post has been updated to clarify launch dates and add a link to the CC0.dev and the NFT Rights Registry.

It’s almost go time, friends. Six weeks ago we published the Loud Paper describing RARA’s Social Curation Protocol for NFTs. Today, that protocol was deployed to mainnet. Here’s how we’ll bring the protocol to you in our upcoming app for curating NFTs.

In short, The Summer of RA! is coming.

This post has been updated as of May 18th, 2022.

Recently, we published the Loud Paper to introduce RARA’s Social Curation Protocol for NFTs. A core primitive of the protocol is transforming NFTs into 1x use reaction tokens, the Web3 equivalent of a like, emoji, or meme.

Today we will dive deeper into reactions as follows:

Pronounced “Rah rah!” like a cheer, the goal of RARA’s protocol and this Loud Paper is to give a voice to a world of curators.

Introduction

Curation of media on the Internet relies on centralized curation of platform algorithms or permission of the media owner. While this system works well for platforms and those with enough money to have a platform, it ignores the broader society’s role in curation. Centralized curation algorithms define “Who are the curators?” and “What media matters?” Consumers of media are becoming wary of the hidden biases and incentives of these centralized curators and the quality of their media feeds. These biases can be avoided when all relevant data and curation algorithms are publicly available. However, this is not done in practice. In Web3, the curation data is publicly available but curation relies on Web2 algorithms or permission of the NFT owner. In the case of existing curation protocols, NFT ownership or permission is often required. As a result, curation incentives are premised on direct NFT sales and sales commissions by third-parties. These solutions prohibit the curation of NFTs not for sale, curation of NFTs without the owner’s permission, and otherwise curation by objective third parties.

What is needed is an open curation protocol for NFTs with transparent incentives for third parties to add social context to NFTs. Permissionless and composable curation replaces centralized curation. Anyone who cares enough can invest a small amount in a curation. Coupled with expression-based investments, communities will form around curation where social context is paramount.

Gm Squad, on December 1st, 2021, we launched the NFT RA!CE to write the first chapter of decentralized curation of NFTs.

In this chapter, we asked the community whether the price of NFTs or ownership of NFT are required for curation? Fifty-two NFT RA!CE’s and three months into the story and RARA’s curator and fans answered simply: No.

Curation tells stories about NFTs and the artists that created them. Curation is about caring for an NFT by giving it context.

Gm, good morning, おはようございます, 早晨好, and Happy Lunar New Year 农历新年快乐 friends.

The NFT RA!CE is going global. Starting at midnight tonight (12:00 AM on 02.02.2022), we’ll host two RA!CE exhibits at Midnight and Noon EST each RA!CE day.

The goal? Make RA!CE exhibits more accessible to our Japanese, Chinese, and community across the world.

New NFT RA!CE times. 12am-4am EST / 2-6pm JST - Wednesday-Friday.

Gm squad, the NFT RA!CE for The RA! Awards x 2021 NFT of the Year is upon us. Voting opens today, Wednesday (12.29), at 12:00 PM EST and closes on Friday, NYE (12.31), at 4:00 PM EST at app.rara.social.

Afternoon squad, RA! Awards coming it hot. From Time Magazine’s “Time Flies” to Doge and Gigachad, the first week of 2021 NFTs of the Year really hit.

RARA is excited to announce The RA! Awards x 2021 NFTs of the Year, according to fans, not price.

Starting today, fans can vote for their favorite NFTs of 2021 in the NFT RA!CE. Each week on Wednesday-Friday (December 15th-31st), Genesis Curators will enter NFTs into the following RA!CE Exhibits:

• Best Art NFT
• Best Music NFT
• Best NFT Collected by a DAO
• Best PFP NFT
• Best Metaverse NFT
• Best NFT That Tells a Story.

In the final week of the year (December 29-31), the Top NFTs of the “Best of” Exhibits will compete in the first ever three day NFT RA!CE for the “2021 NFT of the Year”.

Gm squad,

Last week we announced the NFT RA!CE, the first ever competition to discover the best NFTs according to fans, not price. The competition runs on the first iteration of RARA’s like-to-earn protocol where $RA! tokens are invested to curate NFTs that fans love.

After only 5 NFT RA!CEs, we’ve seen over 1,000 wallets Enter the RA!CE with players earning almost 140,000 $RA! tokens.

There are two ways to compete and earn in the NFT RACE:

Gm squad,

Today RARA.social is announcing a new game designed with one mission in mind: discovering the best NFTs by making likes 👍 and hearts ♥️ valuable.

Stated differently for the Web3 aficionados among us, RARA seeks to decentralize curation of NFTs through a like-to-earn protocol.

Inspired by Mirror's $WRITE Race, we are calling it the NFT RA!CE.