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John Crain

CEO & Founder, SuperRare

Search every verified John Crain interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. John Crain, co-founder and CEO of SuperRare, discussed his background and the platform’s evolution in a September 2026 podcast appearance on the Human Protocol. He described his pre-crypto career path through architecture, civil engineering, and advertising before discovering Bitcoin. Crain recounted that SuperRare initially launched without plans for curation or gatekeeping, but the market’s formation led to a more vetted structure, which he noted had pros and cons and generated internal and external conflict, including criticism directed at him on social media. Crain also reflected on the emotional challenges of building the platform, including periods of doubt. He mentioned that in the summer of 2019, he and his team heavily debated abandoning the project for DeFi, which seemed to be working better at the time, but after soul-searching and renewed activity, they decided to continue. He attributed his persistence to being stubborn. In a lighter moment, he shared that despite SuperRare’s focus on original art, he personally appreciates a good knockoff print for certain spaces and considers it acceptable to buy one.

Recent appearances

Notable quotes

“I remember the summer of 2019 heavily debated just being like should we just scrap this and do DeFi like this seems to be like working way better than everything else and we were kind of like and then after some soulsearching and then like there was some more activity we were like okay now we should just keep going but uh yeah it's very I'd say you have to be very stubborn luckily I'm a fairly stubborn person so I wa”

“It was very hard not to take it personally. So, actually, I had some sales experience. So, actually, my first job out of I guess it was more like an internship. It was kind of like it was like, if this works, you'll get hired. And it ended up not working. So I had interned at like a software, it was like a civil engineering specific company called Act. So I was like trying to sell software again in like the downturn ”

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