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”.

The Top 3 NFTs of each NFT RA!CE are granted access to the RA!CE Gallery, an esteemed showcase of Fan Favorite NFTs. Fans and artists earn $RA! tokens in the NFT RA!CE. Go here to find out how.

How to play? Be a fan. Earn crypto for liking NFTs. Ready? Enter the NFT RA!CE.
When to play? Wednesday - Friday from 12 PM - 4PM EDT (UTC -5).
Want to learn more? Keep reading about 2021 Year in NFTs and the RA! Awards below.

2021, the Year Crypto Became Cool

MMXXI, Two Thousand and Twenty-One, the Year of 2021, what a year.

Crypto people love to talk a lot about “when crypto went mainstream.” Was it the ICO Boom of 2017 when “Everyone [was] Getting Hilariously Rich” or was it when we all became Yam 🧑‍🌾 🍠 Famers in DeFi Summer of 2021? Or, did crypto go mainstream when the conversation stopped being about the price and more something else?

For RARA, 2021 was the year crypto got Snoop D-O-Double-G. More precisely, 2021 was the year crypto became cool.

What is Cool?

From the growing list of sports athletes and celebrities changing their profile pics (“PFPs”) on Twitter to NFTs to the endless parade of music NFT drops, NFTs in 2021 dripped of cool. While technically crypto didn’t get Snoop Dogg (he’d been collecting NFTs for a hot minute as an anon), NFTs shifted society in 2021.

We went from being the outsiders of geeks and traders to purveyors of Internet artifacts and builders of dope metaverse galleries for art, music NFTs, and beyond. As Zora tweeted at the close of 2020, NFTs are an Internet Renaissance.

Where the Internet freed all information, crypto and NFTs finally gave us some ownership back. No more agents. No more middlemen. Just money for artist and a simple connection with fans.

The power of the price of NFTs

With an Internet Renaissance, came a lot of money for artists and NFT creators.

Only six days into the year, Gmoney dropped 140 ETH (approximately $170,000 at the time) on CryptoPunk after noticing discord users changing the profile pics as a “flex” to be “part of some exclusive club.”

By February, all of the Internet’s memes were being minted. Nyan Cat sold for 300 ETH in a bidding war mixed full of meme numbers. Internet culture can now be priced.

Then, NFTs went wild in March. Trading volume went hyperbolic and mega NFT sales hit all of the headlines. Beeple’s $69 million sale at Christie’s of “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” was likely the hallmark moment for your friends and family to remember.

“I made a picture from start to finish every single day from May 1st, 2007 - January 7th, 2021. This is every motherfucking one of those pictures,” beeple.

Defi got into the NFT game when Uniswap dropped an NFT in advance of the launch of V3 of their decentralized exchange. Created by pplpleasr, a self-described “high quality meme generator”, the NFT was titled “x*y=k”, a reference to Uniswap’s pricing curve. The result? Capturing all of the NFT and DeFi’s attention.

“Anyone want to create a quick DAO to bid on this???,” tweet from @lay2000lbs led to PleasrDAO creation and eventual winning bid of 310 ETH.

One NFT collected after another, NFT DAOs moved the conversation beyond an individual’s hobby to a movement of a communities collecting together. “Apes Together Strong” NFT is this meme fully realized. ConstitutionDAO ($PEOPLE) took to this to the extreme in a failed attempt at buying a copy of the U.S. Constitution after raising $45 million from thousands of people.

By April, Bored Ape Yacht Club took what the CryptoPunks started with 10,000 generative NFTs for communities and thew gas on the fire with a simple twist, a grant of commercial rights. From t-shirts and party swag to Jenkins the Valet’s Writer’s Room and $NOVEL, NFTs moved beyond a single purchase to a shared experience, shared creation.

Then, summer came. Every NFT was a 10k drop and every conversation was about the “floor price”. Bitcoin Miami was overrun by NFTs on Ethereum, and crypto was about the money and simultaneously cool…which leads us back to RARA and The RA! Awards.

The RA! Awards

A few weeks ago, RARA announced the NFT RA!CE, a daily like-to-earn competition to discover the best NFTs according to fans, not price.

Only 6 RA!CE down, we’ve seen over 5000 wallets connect to earn crypto liking NFTs. Curious as to why? It likely comes down to accessibility and simplicity.

New-to-crypto and NFT users will like an NFT before they’ll every buy an NFT. You don’t need huge bags of ETH to play. You don’t even need ETH for gas. You just need to have an opinion.

Think an NFT is cool and it is trending? Invest $RA! to help curate the best NFTs according to fans, not price.

Submitting an NFT for the RA! Awards

To enter an NFT into the RA!CE for the RA! Awards, you must be a Genesis Curator. This role is currently reserved for Genesis Curator NFT owners.

In 2022, any player of the NFT RA!CE will be able earn the right to curate if they are in the Top 10 TASTE Leaderboard (RARA’s reputation system for tastemakers).

With over 18 million NFTs on OpenSea alone, Genesis Curators have their work cut out for them. While we may miss a few for logistical reasons (curation is hard) or technical reason (we currently only support NFTs on OpenSea, Foundation, or Zora), it’s important to ask the question. What NFTs do fans like?

Here are the RA! Awards’ RA!CE Exhibits up for fan recognition:
Wednesday (December 15th) - Best NFT Art of 2021
Thursday (16th) - Best Music NFT of 2021
Friday (17th) - Best NFT Collected by a DAO in 2021
Wednesday (22nd) - Best PFP NFT of 2021
Thursday (23rd) - Best Metaverse NFT of 2021
Friday (24th) - Best NFT That Tells a Story
Wednesday-Friday (29th-31st) - 2021 NFT of the Year

Winners of the RA! Awards

The creators of the Top 3 NFTs of every RA!CE earn a share of the RA!CE Reward (500, 300, and 200 $RA! to 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place). Additionally, the Top 3 NFTs are granted access to the RA!CE Gallery in the app and our coming metaverse galleries. Read more here.

On top of the normal RA!CE Reward, the creators of the Top 3 NFTs in the RA! Awards will earn a bonus $RA! for this special award ceremony equal to 50%, 30%, and 20% of the RA!CE Pot to 1st, 2nd, and 3rd respectively.

First place of each RA! Award will earn a commemorative NFT for the RA! Rewards x 2021 NFTs of the Year.

Finally, creators of the NFTs winning a RA! Award will get the simple title of Fan Favorite.

That’s it. Go play. Be a fan. Like NFTs. Earn Crypto. Enter the NFT RA!CE.