How Rare Is Your NFT? This New Feature Can Help You

Rar­i­ty is strong­ly cor­re­lat­ed with val­ue. That’s the rea­son exclu­siv­i­ty is impor­tant for NFT col­lec­tors. It has been hard to put a fin­ger on the exclu­siv­i­ty of the fea­tures of one NFT piece against the oth­er in the absence of a stan­dard­ized rank­ing mechanism.

The result has been chaos, says OpenSea. “When rar­i­ty rank­ings vary across plat­forms and use dif­fer­ent method­olo­gies, it can cause con­fu­sion for buy­ers and sell­ers and make it dif­fi­cult to use rar­i­ty for pur­chase and sale deci­sions,” it said.

The plan is to build “a uni­fied, open, trans­par­ent and repro­ducible stan­dard for rar­i­ty rank­ings across the NFT industry.”

Why rank your NFT?

Open­Rar­i­ty is a joint ven­ture between OpenSea, icy.tools, Curio, and PROOF. Users have the option to show whether their col­lec­tions are rare or not. A col­lec­tion that opts in will have to show a num­ber mark­ing their rar­i­ty rank­ing on the item page and on the col­lec­tion page.

OpenSea said the clas­si­fi­ca­tion is cru­cial in mar­kets that are inter­op­er­a­ble, where dif­fer­ent NFTs can be interchanged.

“If you hov­er over the num­ber, you’ll see the per­cent­age rank­ing. Open­Rar­i­ty rar­i­ty rank­ings direct­ly reflect the cre­ator pub­lished attribute data, and can change over time if the cre­ator makes changes to item meta­da­ta,” OpenSea detailed.

Pudgy Pen­guins, one of the ear­li­est NFT col­lec­tions on Open­Rar­i­ty, has enlist­ed 8,888 non-fun­gi­ble tokens of dif­fer­ent attrib­ut­es. Accord­ing to a descrip­tion of the col­lec­tion on Rar­i­ty Tools, Pudgys “embody love, empa­thy, and compassion”.

They “are a bea­con of good vibes and pos­i­tiv­i­ty for every­one. Each hold­er receives exclu­sive access to expe­ri­ences, events, IP licens­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties, and more,” it says. 

Pudgy Penguin’s floor price aver­aged 3.8 ETH, or around $4,900, on Fri­day, 2.7% on the day. The col­lec­tion has had 66 ETH (~ $86,000) in sales in the last 24 hours, a 30% decline from the pre­vi­ous day, accord­ing to data from NFT Floor Price.

Cool Cats, anoth­er col­lec­tion, has 9,999 ran­dom­ly gen­er­at­ed non-fun­gi­ble tokens on Open­Rar­i­ty. The con­cept is that hold­ers of the NFT can par­tic­i­pate in exclu­sive events such as NFT claims, raf­fles, com­mu­ni­ty give­aways, and more.

At the time of writ­ing, Cool Cats sold for an aver­age price of 2.95 ETH (~ $3,800) each, ris­ing 7.2% in the pre­vi­ous 24 hours, with vol­ume of 96.89 ETH (~ $126,000).

Rarity is not a magic pill

How­ev­er, a recent study by the Stevens Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy found that rar­i­ty may not be the mag­ic pill for NFTs. There are sev­er­al poten­tial demer­its, it said.

Jor­dan Suchow, a cog­ni­tive sci­en­tist who led the study, warned that the buzz sur­round­ing rare non-fun­gi­ble tokens needs to be man­aged, as there can be bore­dom on the part of collectors.

“Because NFT trad­ing records are pub­lic, they offer a remark­able chance for us to look at why peo­ple per­ceive cer­tain things as valu­able, and how those changes over time,” said Suchow.

Suchow stud­ied col­lec­tors of the Bored Ape Yacht Club and observed dimin­ished inter­est in the NFTs as time progressed.

An acces­sorized ape is con­sid­ered rare, com­pared to a plain-clothed ape. Suchow said this might be inter­est­ing in ear­ly days, but as one‘s col­lec­tion con­tin­ues to grow, the apes may end up appear­ing like the same thing.

“It’s a bit like stamp col­lect­ing: the stamps all look the same, so if there’s a print­ing error or some oth­er rare fea­ture that sets a stamp apart, peo­ple will pay far more for it,” he explained.

“Today, a new­com­er to Bored Ape trad­ing sees these rare apes every­where and per­ceives them to be much more com­mon than in fact they are.”

Con­tin­u­ing, Suchow observed:

“If a per­son wants to learn what a dog is they could do so by going to a dog park and look­ing at a range of com­mon ani­mals. Going to an exper­i­men­tal breed­er and look­ing only at rare breeds, on the oth­er hand, would skew their per­cep­tion of the cat­e­go­ry and of how much any giv­en dog is worth.”

The sci­en­tist con­cludes that rar­i­ty could become self-defeat­ing as it deters trade in ordi­nary pieces which make up the bulk of the market.

Not a new concept

Rar­i­ty is not a new con­cept. In tra­di­tion­al art and music, there is some­thing called ‘collector‘s items, which are not pro­duced for the mass market.

Hip Hop group Wu-Tang Clan sold their album, “Once Upon A Time In Shaolin,” to a cryp­to group for NFTs worth around $4 mil­lion. The album‘s con­tent is yet to be accessed by the mass market.

For Be[In]Crypto’s lat­est Bit­coin (BTC) analy­sis, click here

Disclaimer

All the infor­ma­tion con­tained on our web­site is pub­lished in good faith and for gen­er­al infor­ma­tion pur­pos­es only. Any action the read­er takes upon the infor­ma­tion found on our web­site is strict­ly at their own risk.