OpenSea launches new NFT rarity ranking tool OpenRarity

OpenSea, the world’s biggest NFT marketplace, has officially announced OpenRarity, a new NFT rarity protocol for the NFT community, elaborated together with Web3 analytics experts Icy.tools, Curio Tools, and PROOF, to provide a new standard of NFT ranking methods. OpenRarity will be launched next week.

Nowadays, there are several high-profile NFT rarity platforms, and each has its own way of determining rarity — most of them are similar but with some differences, which are confusing for NFT buyers looking for data on rarity and ranking.

OpenRarity is a new NFT rarity protocol with its own platform. Created for the NFT community, it aims to set a new universal standard for ranking the rarity of NFTs in a sophisticated market.

The OpenSea team, in partnership with Icy.tools, Curio Tools, and PROOF, have developed a transparent, mathematically sound, and objective rarity calculation method, which is entirely open-source and could be reproduced by anyone.

Moreover, to ensure the OpenRarity protocol works and is simple to understand, it has been vetted with creator teams representing several top-100 collections by volume.

“We believe it’s important to find a way to provide a unified, transparent, and consistent set of rarity rankings across all platforms to help build more trust in the industry through transparency,” OpenSea said in a statement.

OpenSea wants to create a transparent, consistent, easy-to-find, simplistic, rarity ranking system, solving three following problems:

1. The NFT ranking industry combines the concepts of rarity (mathematical scarcity of attributes) with creator ties and market value, which bases value on attributes other than scarcity. OpenRarity will offer these in separate rankings.
2. Closed-source code is used to determine rankings and uses ‘meta traits’ that do not exist on-chain. Meta traits, such as trait count and other hidden values, cause considerable discrepancies in the rarity rankings across the market. OpenRarity will use a fully open-source program for its data and excludes meta traits from its ranking system.
3. Many rarity tool providers charge NFT projects to list collections on their platforms. OpenRarity wants to create a fair environment for all.

The OpenSea new rarity ranking will use the mathematic theory of information content, also known as information theory, self-information, surprisal, or Shannon information, to determine NFT rarity.

Also, the OpenSea team plans to use community feedback to improve the OpenRarity protocol, using an opt-in system for creators.

Several blue-chip NFT projects are already signing on to use the OpenRarity protocol.

One of them, the popular NFT profile picture project Cool Cats, tweeted on Sept. 15: 

“We’re excited to be one of the first creators to opt-in on the new @openrarity NFT ecosystem on @opensea! Cool Cats is set to launch on the new rarity standard next week, with Cool Pets following soon. Stay tuned…”