OpenSea announced on Twitter the invention of a rare protocol termed OpenRarity in collaboration with Curio, icy.tools, and PROOF to develop a truly transparent, open-source rarity rating system that would benefit artists and consumers. OpenRarity will make its OpenSea debut next week.

Due to the advent of new markets and NFT technologies, there has been a divergence in rarity rankings across platforms, which may be deceptive or confusing to buyers and sellers. OpenSea believes that finding a way to provide a single, transparent, and consistent set of rarity rankings across all platforms is vital to increasing industry trust through transparency.

Because OpenRarity is optional, collections and NFT developers can choose whether or not to utilize it. Developers will have access to the API if consumers choose to participate in OpenRarity, expanding user access to this data. According to OpenSea,

“We hope that OpenRarity starts the process of demystifying & standardizing rarity calculations and kickstarts a broader conversation about the factors that matter when participating within the NFT space.”

OpenRarity’s Discovered Issues

In modern society, the concepts of rarity and creator tiers or market value, which bestow worth to features or things regardless of scarcity, are mixed together. The rarity rankings of today are determined by closed-source code, and they frequently change between publishers. Tool providers sometimes charge creators for rarity rankings, which does not give a level playing field for low-budget enterprises.

OpenRarity Principles

The OpenRarity methodology is based on the following fundamental concepts:

• It must be straightforward for developers, users, and producers to understand.
• It must be objective and based on mathematical notions (open-source, introspectable).
• When the dataset is updated, it must be straightforward to recalculate (new mints, metadata typos, mutable attributes).
• It must provide consistent rarity rankings for all publishers.