Introducing rarity.tools

4 min readApr 28, 2021

rarity.tools is a website dedicated to ranking generative art and collectible NFTs by rarity.

Currently included NFT projects on the site are CryptoPunks, Hashmasks, Waifusion, Chubbies and Bored Ape Yacht Club

Why a rarity ranking site?

One of the most common questions people ask in the discords of collectible NFT projects is ‘how rare is mine’.

This is because rarity is one of the most important factors (if not the most important factor) in determining the value of an individual NFT.

People want to know how rare their NFT is or whether the one they are looking at buying is rare. And how rare?

The solution

rarity.tools aims to provide an easy to understand and sensible ranking of the rarity of individual collectible NFTs and can be used to easily answer the question of how rare any NFT is within their collection.

With this info NFT collectors can more easily value and compare relative value of individual NFTs against each other.

How does rarity.tools ranking work?

The big picture is, each trait of an individual NFT is given a Rarity Score and then the Rarity Score for all traits of that NFT are added up to become the NFTs overall Rarity Score

All NFTs in a collection are then ranked by their total Rarity Score.

Here is an example:

Ranking Customized for each Project

Each collectible NFT community values their NFTs differently.

The CryptoPunks community for example gives a lot of importance to the ‘attribute count’ of each CryptoPunk, which is why the only CryptoPunk with 7 attributes is ranked as the rarest one. On the other hand other communities don’t really care about attribute count.

The Waifusion community gives importance to clothing and style matches. For example, one reason Alita is the top Waifusion is because she is the only one with matching Wacdonalds tops and bottoms:

In many cases these traits or qualities are not encoded in the basic traits.

In Waifusion’s case, it’s raw trait data does not include any ‘top-bottom matching’ trait, so naively ranking Waifusions to their basic trait data would not place a high enough value on waifus with matching tops and bottoms.

The Waifusion on the right has matching kimono top and bottom while the left one doesn’t. Thus the right one is generally considered more valuable.

Because each collectible NFT community values their NFTs differently, rarity.tools customizes the ranking for each project by adding additional ‘derived traits’.

In Waifusion and Chubbies’ case for example, ‘Top Bottom Matching’ traits have been added and are counted towards the total Rarity Score of an individual NFT.

This Chubbies gets a big Rarity Score boost from being one of 16 Chubbies with a matching Kaiju top and bottom.

Additionally, we are always looking to add additional trait data as they become available. In Hashmasks case for example, once we have detailed specific mask data, those can be added.

Community Guided Ranking

Because we want our service to provide the most value to each NFT community, we would love to hear from you regarding your thoughts on tuning the ranking!

So if you have any feedback or suggestions, you can tweet us at https://twitter.com/raritytools on twitter, or even better, just send a direct message on twitter as it can be hard to keep track of the mentions.

Rarity is not Everything

Even though rarity is important when valuing an NFT, it is not the only factor one should consider.

Some NFTs might have unique aesthetics and some NFTs might have unique trait combinations that can’t be accounted for. So don’t use the rarity as the only determining factor.

Most individual NFTs in generative NFT collections are unique 1 of 1 when considering all their traits combined.

So how valuable each one is is up to you!

Also: Ultra Fast Filtering

As you can see from the site, rarity.tools not only provides rarity ranking, but also provides extremely fast filtering of NFT collections by trait. Filtering is practically instant in most cases.

Additionally you can ‘drill down’ to see how many NFTs exist if you narrow down them further.

For example, on the left after selecting ‘shiny’ with Drill Down Mode turned on, you can quickly see that there are only 3 shiny Snowmen.

Also: Recently Listed

You can also view Recently Listed NFTs in each collection with prices from OpenSea. Viewing them on rarity.tools allows you to quickly see their rarity rank and trait rarity scores.