Rarity
For the sake of the newbies I will explain what NFTs are:
NFTs, widely known as Non-Fungible Tokens, are tokens I would like to call media tokens. They are like other tokens but in this case they are unique and represented with media. So they are in the form of an art piece, a picture, a video, or even audio. They are embedded on a blockchain because they are tokens, and they also serve as proof of ownership. Because of its unique non-fungibility they can’t be exchanged for another, unlike Bitcoin or Hive. For example, your 1 Hive is the same as another’s 1 Hive. This means that Hive is fungible, but with NFTs, my NFT avatar is different from another one’s NFT avatar. The qualities and features are different, for the fact that they have a Hive punk doesn’t mean that we can exchange that punk for another punk and have the same thing. This is what makes NFTs unique.
NFTs come in different ways but lately we have been seeing NFTs come in collections and have some similarities but differ by rarities. What do I mean by having some similarities but different rarities? I will use humans as an example.
We are all humans with similarities which are:
Having 1 Head: With 2 Eyes, 2 Ears,1 Nose and 1 Mouth
Having A Body: Which consist of 2 hands, legs and all their qualities.
But in Rarity we differ from the color of our skin, our height, body size, shape of head, type and style of beards and also what we wear. Our age and gender still add up to what makes us rare as humans. Same way we can use to consider the rarity of an NFT collection.
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When I think about the rarity of an NFT, I think about a lot of different factors. I’ll try to make this make as much sense as possible. Because NFTs are so unique, every collection can have its own version of rarity. I think what we’re looking at here is the macro version of that, which is the real-world rarity. So on a macro scale, if you’re looking strictly at the NFT itself, and not the collection within which it exists, there’s a few criteria for rarity that I look at.
Perhaps the most important criteria that I look at. The community surrounding a particular NFT collection can help you tell how rare they are. For example, if you look at the insane community around Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs. You can look at a collection’s Twitter account a lot of the time, as well as the Discord, and most of them have Telegram. You can pop into any of these and really get a feel for how the community’s vibe toward the NFTs is. Without the community supporting the NFT collection, is it really worth anything?
The second most important, in my opinion, is the Mint #. What does that mean? Mint Number of an NFT is the number in the collection that it represents. For example, I have a Mint #1 Godzilla Animated Comic NFT and there are 175 of them that exist. I have the first one that was ever ‘minted’ or created. Mint #1 and mint #69 are very different because they have different meta-data on the blockchain. The mint #1 is arguably more rare.
Lastly, I look for a use case when considering an NFT’s ‘rarity’. Not all NFTs are built the same. Not all NFTs can be used to do something. A CryptoPunk ain’t gunna be used in a game, I’m sorry. You’re not gunna be able to stake your Beeple NFT. The ones that I think bring real-world value via bring usable in a play to earn game or staking… Those are the really rare ones. Obviously their supply is considered here. If it’s an NFT that can mine crypto, I want one that only a few people can get vs. one that millions of people can get. I’ll use R-Planet Land for an example here, there were very few sold. The owners get crypto every hour just for holding the NFT. That, in my opinion, is more valuable than a profile picture. Therefore, more rare.
It all comes down to how you view rarity. It’s opinion based at the end of the day. I’ll ask the question, though. What do you think is a rare NFT?
