SIP | Modernizing File Size Limits on SuperRare

[pislices]

Author	Pi-Slices
Status	Draft
Type	Governance
Implementor	SuperRare
Sponsor(s)	TBD
Temperature Check Poll	Discord
Created Date	2022-07-28

Summary

This proposal states the case for raising the current file size limits of MP4 and GLB files on SuperRare from 50 MB to 250 MB.

Abstract

File size limitations on SuperRare have become increasingly problematic for artists who would like to mint high quality or longer-form video artworks. When compared to other NFT marketplaces, SuperRare’s existing limitations appear to have fallen behind the majority of the industry. Raising these limitations would allow SuperRare to remain competitive and provide additional incentive for artists to continue minting high quality artworks on SuperRare.

Motivation

Artists choose to mint on SuperRare as a premier marketplace for single edition NFTs. Ideally, artists consider the implications of creating NFTs tied to their artwork and craft their files with the understanding that their art/NFTs should still be available 50+ years from now. Potential future developments in physical displays, metaverse platforms, internet speed, etc., mean that compromising on fidelity/quality for file size now will have an impact on how our artworks may be perceived 5, 10, or 50 years into the future.

Ultimately, the goal here is to allow the future-minded artists on SuperRare to spend less time compromising on the resolution, duration, and quality of their artworks, and more time creating artworks that they can be proud to look back on long-term knowing they weren’t artificially limited by file size.

Specification

To determine a reasonable file size to propose, I’ve compiled the following table of current competitor marketplace limitations:

Marketplace	Size Limit	Source
Nifty Gateway	300 MB	Source
MakersPlace	200 MB	Source
Manifold	200 MB	Source
OpenSea	100 MB	Source
Rarible	100 MB	Source
KnownOrigin	75 MB	Source
Foundation	50 MB	Source
SuperRare	50 MB	Source

For SuperRare, as stated by Charles on the SuperRare discord back in 2020, this limit is hard set at 52,428,800 bytes (50 MB).

From the table above, it is notable that SuperRare currently does not offer a competitive file size limit when compared to other NFT marketplaces. Taking that into account, I believe an acceptable new file size limit for SuperRare would be 250 MB, or 262,144,000 bytes. This would give artists more freedom to experiment with the duration and resolution of their artworks, without compromising nearly as much on overall quality.

The current 50 MB limit applies to all supported file types (PNG, JPEG, GIF, MP4, GLB). Personally, I believe that the 50 MB limit is currently acceptable for PNG/JPEG/GIF files. I am proposing that the limit is raised only for MP4 and GLB files, which would see significantly more benefit from the additional file size capacity.

While I would prefer to limit scope creep on this proposal for the sake of implementation time, pending discussion, I would be open to revising the inclusion of the other stated file types if there is a technical case for it. Otherwise, if this proposal is successful, it could serve as a template for SIPs covering potential adjustments to the file size limits in the future.

Benefits

The main benefit of raising the file size limit is that artists will have an improved ability to future-proof their work when minting on SuperRare. This also provides benefit to SuperRare as a marketplace, as it would allow artists to continue to consider SuperRare as a viable option for minting their best, highest quality artworks. This serves to continue pushing the platform as the premiere marketplace for single edition art NFTs.

Drawbacks

The two primary drawbacks of this proposal are the potential for increased storage/IPFS/bandwidth related costs, and marginally longer loading times for artworks that approach the increased limitations.

Outcomes

If successful, this proposal will result in SuperRare’s MP4 & GLB file size limits being raised from 50 MB (52428800 bytes) to 250 MB (262144000 bytes), giving artists more creative freedom to mint their best artworks on SuperRare.

[Keegan]

This is a well written proposal, and kudos for noticing something that a lot of creators struggle with and taking the initiative to formulate something to help address it. But my intuition says this is outside of the DAO’s jurisdiction. There’s nothing at the contract/protocol level that restricts what you upload. As far as I understand it’s entirely a user-interface limit on the .com mint page.

There are creators that mint to SR token contracts straight through etherscan with self-constructed metadata and pin their own files to IPFS to get around the cap. Doing that is technical for sure, but is effectively the same outcome as minting to a sovereign contract on Manifold– which is another route creators can use.

I think that if this went up for vote, that it would pass is basically guaranteed. But it challenges where the line between what features of SuperRare.com are up for governing by the DAO. So I’d like to see a little more clarity about that delineation beforehand.

(Not saying OP that you should be providing that clarity- but probably something that should get brought up with the council and SR founders at a town hall.)

[pislices]

Hi @Keegan,

Thank you for adding your thoughts on this! I would say we’re definitely on the same page regarding some additional clarity being required about the scope of DAO governance for the website itself. I would love to see some thoughts on that from @elo, @SuperRareJohn, or anyone else who might be able to add relevant commentary here.

Personally, I would’ve been happiest to see this implemented without the need for a proposal. It’s an issue I am fairly certain I’ve seen brought up at least since MP4 support was added (March 2020). I’m conscious of the fact that developer time is a limited resource, but it is admittedly a bit frustrating on the artist side to watch nearly every other platform successfully raise their limits, while SuperRare’s have remained stagnant.

For some additional context, I went through the SuperRare Discord and found messages from staff dating back to at least January 2021 discussing the potential of raising file size limits (and another from January 2022, with a more or less identical message).

I have no context on the potential difficulty of making this upgrade, but I would absolutely be curious to know why/how ~18+ months later, this isn’t a solved problem. I am sure that having some transparency at least regarding a timeline or what would go into this upgrade on the development side would go a long way for the many artists who have been asking about this.

At the risk of straying too far off topic, I will leave another SR Discord message from February 2020 regarding a separate, highly requested feature that has had a similar response. Something to consider for a separate SIP I suppose…

At the very least, I just wanted to create this SIP as a means to quantify the demand behind this upgrade. In 3 days, the temp check for this proposal on Discord has had more supporting votes than any other SIP so far, which I do hope shows the current level of interest for raising the existing limits (regardless of whether or not it is within the DAO’s jurisdiction).

[pislices]

I listened through today’s SuperRare DAO Town Hall meeting recording. This was originally meant to be a response on Discord, but ended up being much longer than I expected, so I thought I’d just keep everything within the SIP discussion. I’ll cc @RareKoko here, as this is in response to what you spoke about during the meeting.

I’m very glad to hear the SR side of this issue. My first thoughts on this are mostly related to the marketplace / page load speed viewpoints that were shared. The proposal right now specifies raising the limit for only MP4/GLB files. Right now we’re already constrained to a lower quality 10 MB jpeg/gif as the thumbnail that is used for the marketplace / homepage feed views. There was mention that SR doesn’t like to “degrade the presentation of the art on the site”, but there’s already no way to accurately preview a longer MP4 without going to the artwork page anyways.

SR doesn’t have any sort of hover to load/preview feature for video like most other marketplaces, so as it stands I’m not sure there is ever a point where you’re loading a full-size video within marketplace/homepage view? As the SIP is written, as far as I can tell, it would have no functional impact on the load times in those views. The only place it would have an impact would be on the actual artwork page, where a user already has the expectation that they’re going to load a large file (mp4/glb/etc). That being said, I’d be very curious for a collector’s take on if/how an artwork page taking marginally longer to load would impact their collecting decisions…

Regarding hosting infrastructure, etc., not to cherry pick data too much (as I’m sure there are other variables), but I’d be curious to know how MakersPlace is supporting a 200 MB limit with a tiny fraction of SR’s overall volume, and a similar fee structure (and thus revenue).

Source: https://cryptoart.io/data

Compared to some of the other platforms listed in the SIP, SR also has a pretty small pool of curated artists, and <40,000 tokens minted total, growing pretty linearly at least since 2021 (and MP4/GLB mints representing only a certain portion of that). If the limits are raised, it doesn’t mean that suddenly every 50MB mint will be 250MB instead. It would however make sense to see those file sizes trend towards the limit over time as technology improves, with some portion of current artworks already hitting the limit. This change also has no impact on all the existing tokens so far, so it would only be a small portion of the files impacting the infrastructure shortly after this would be implemented.

Regarding the “creative restriction promotes better thinking” argument, why would a collector want a 1000x1000 artwork over a 4000x4000 artwork with all else equal but file size? I say this as an artist who has spent a lot of time compressing my artwork into 1MB GIFs on Tumblr years ago. Their file size limit is higher now, and I feel much more freedom in what I am able to create/share in that format on their platform now. Same idea applies here. There is obviously some merit to that argument, but when aspects like resolution and bitrate make such a large difference in the visual quality of the art, I don’t see artificial limitation as a positive force.

I realize there is no way to implement this without trade-offs, I just hope that this SIP / forum discussion can provide a productive avenue for artists & SuperRare to determine the most appropriate way of implementing this where most people can be happy with the outcome.

Please let me know if anything I’ve said so far is off-base, as I’m sure it’s in everyone’s best interest for all of us to be on the same page regarding the constraints of implementing this. Thank you!

[Overlap]

250MB is a crucial improvement to SR. Also a hover to load/preview feature for video as mentioned by pislices would really improve the whole SR experience. Cool it’s being discussed.

[pislices]

I thought I would just quickly bump this topic in the interest of having a Council member sponsor this proposal. The current SIP procedures note that proposals should be discussed for a minimum of five days post-temp check. We’re 20 days in now, and the temp check for this proposal is currently sitting at around 40% more supporting votes than the next most supported SIP.

Is there anything that this proposal is missing that is preventing it from being in a state that is worth sponsoring? I am not unwilling to make revisions if necessary, but there is pretty clearly community support on this proposal as-is given the temp check results.

Either way, would love to see some acknowledgement from SRL of this SIP (and the above discussion) to help push this through or make the necessary changes.