Why we need OpenRarity

As we researched the rarity landscape, we came across a number of issues:

1. We conflate the concepts of rarity (mathematical scarcity of attributes), and creator tiers or market value that assign value to attributes or items independent of scarcity. While we believe each of these are important, they should be separated.

2. Rarity rankings today are produced using closed-source code and rankings tend to be divergent across publishers (tools, marketplaces, etc). There is no single source of truth.

3. Creators are often charged for rarity rankings by tool providers which doesn’t provide a fair playing field for lower budget projects.

Consensus and transparency are fundamental to the blockchain and Web3, and so we think there’s an opportunity to create a verifiable, consistent, and mathematically-grounded methodology for producing rarity ranks that can build more trust in the space in the long-term.

This divergence confirms the inconsistency across private rarity providers, and since each provider is using a proprietary, and sometimes bespoke, closed-source methodology, we cannot verify their implementation.

Meta traits contribute to divergence

A prominent source of rank divergence is due to the incorporation of meta traits. “Meta traits” are traits that don’t exist in the “on-chain” metadata, and are created off-chain by rarity providers. For example, “Trait Count” is a synthetic trait that affects rarity ranks, and not all platforms use this. There are more complex meta traits (e.g. Deadfellaz “Rotten Count”) that make reproducing these ranks impossible without custom code, making it harder for developers to produce consistent rarity ranks.

We fully support creator-determined rankings, however, OpenRarity is currently focused on representing the purely mathematical and objective rarity determined solely by on-chain metadata.