I’ve been involved with 3 pretty radical projects that are challenging standard NFT conventions. The major aspect they share is that they all have Dynamic Rarity for their NFTs. What do I mean by this?…For example if you hold the 5th rarest NFT in collection, it is likely it will not remain the 5th rarest NFT due to metadata shifts on your NFT itself or the other NFTs in the collection. Remember rarity is calculated relative to all other NFT metadata within the collection. All of these projects attracted me due to their innovations, however all of the projects floors are below 0.05 at the time of this writing, which leads me to believe the the general community is not ready dynamic rarity, yet.
The 3 projects I will be exploring are 1) PuzlPunks (part of PuzlWorld), 2) Rubber Ducky Bath Party and 3) War Kittens
Puzl Punks
I go into great detail on Puzl Punks and the direction of their new PuzlWorld in a former article, but I’ll recap here what is is. You build “Puzl Punk PFPs by opening packs (NFTs that looked like a pack of cards) and getting trait NFTs. You would then use those traits to assemble personalized CryptoPunk-like PFPs.”
Traits have different rarities, and those rarities even change as new packs are opened up and the pool of available traits increase. Therefore every single time a Puzl Punk is minted, there is a chance the rarity of a Puzl Punk you created will change. you can actually view the rarity scale here: https://www.puzl.world/gallery
For example if I built the PuzlPunk in the above screenshot I likely would bump the 3rd rarest Punk out of its position because I used a lot of similar traits.
The overall sentiment is that building these punks is fun from a customization standpoint. People in the Puzl community are competitive too! Overall there hasn’t been too much angst around the dynamic rarity because 1) The top rare punks don’t change that much because most harbor rare traits, 2) The project is much bigger than the Punks, and the Puzl Punks only represent a portion of the larger ecosystem Puzl World is building and 3) All Punks will have utility in PuzlWorld and rarity doesn’t affect that utility. However certain traits will have benefits such as having a Police Cap (which isn’t that rare) will allow you to do certain jobs that other punks can’t do.
Rarity Assessment:
- Rarity Shifting: Moderate
- Utility outside of Rarity: High
- Control over Rarity: High
- Mint: Free for pack, 0.02 to create a Punk
- Current Floor: 0.035 for Punk / 0.025 for Pack
- My Fun Index: 10/10
Rubber Ducky Bath Party
Rubber Ducky Bath Party is a whimsical project where you have rubber ducks who attend monthly bath parties, and they can lose, gain, or swap a trait randomly, with even a small chance of becoming a 1 of 1 duck. You could even earn special traits at the bath parties which got you access to Mintlists/Allowlists on other projects.
In the above example you can see I’ve attended all bath parties, and the first one my cat ear headband was swapped for some kind of spiked hair, and then the second time I lost my cool purple rain background. Needless to say this ducky went down in rarity. Across all my ducks, I think I only got rarer on 2 out of 12 owned, which kind of sucks. The parties have great custom music sound tracks, and the production is A+. However there is zero control over the outcome, only whether you decide to attend the party or not. Even if you sit a party, your rarity rank will change due to the other ducks changing.
Rubber Ducky Bath Party issued a long statement that you can read here if you get your glasses. I’ll summarize below it, because no-one is going to read it due to the length, and/or the illegibility as a tiny screenshot.
Best quote from above: “ Since it’s a dynamic art collection, without any set boundaries, people have a hard time figuring out how they should evaluate the value of a duck. This problem exists both from an investor perspective (“What do I expect the market is willing to pay for a duck given its traits and rarity”) as well as from a personal perspective (“I love the rainbow cap and am willing to pay X for it”).”
Summary: They are going to do a freeze at the end of the year, where you get to pick one state of your duck across all the former party states, and that will become your forever duck. The collection will then cease to be a dynamic rarity collection and offer new “secret” utility instead. Therefore it’s in the best interest to attend every single bath party for more options.
The interesting thing is, it will be very interesting to see how this freeze plays out. For example the rainbow mouth might become super common because a lot of people like it, and less aesthetically pleasing traits might become rare. I’m sad I have to wait until the end of the year to see how this plays out!
Assessment:
- Rarity Shifting: High
- Utility outside of Rarity: Low
- Control over Rarity: Low
- Mint: 0.08
- Current Floor: 0.028 (65% down)
- My Fun Index: 4/10 (Only bcuz bath parties once a month)
War Kittens
War Kittens is a novel PFP on chain game, where you battle pixelated kittens to steal traits and make cool kittens. In turn you leave them with whatever trait you had in the same slot. For example if I wanted your super rare sword, I could attack your Kitten, with mine and if I’m successful I get your sword, and you could end up getting my flaming bat for example.
There are a few caveats however… 1) you can move your cats into defense and stay there as long as you want and 2) there are cooldowns after you attack before you can attack again, or go into defense. This sniping game has led people to create super cool cats (pro), and then put them into a defense mode pretty much forever (pro or con- depending who is the owner :) This has led to some traits becoming very inaccessible. Furthermore some people just put their cats into defense with 1 rare trait and try to sell that trait. Overall I’ve battled a lot of cats and really enjoy the hunt of the game. You can’t filter in the arena and you have to scroll through and try to identify cats with traits you want.
You can use Opensea to filter on traits, but a problem is you aren’t guaranteed to have the proper state on a particular kitten ID. Often I’ve had to refresh the metadata only to find out the trait has already been stolen. Additionally on Opensea you can’t tell if a kitten is in the arena or on defense so you have to do some cross referencing. You really should only buy kittens on Opensea if you check the defense state on the war kitten website, and make sure the cat you see on Opensea is the one you’re paying for! Note: I’ve been screwed by placing a WETH offer on a cat with a trait I really wanted only to have that owner have the cat “lose” the trait by battling one of their own cats, and then accepting my offer… I would highly recommend staying away from offers on this project.
Over time we are seeing more and more kittens staying in defense and many rare traits becoming impossible to obtain. I feel like we are reaching an equilibrium where we will see a lot less rarity shifts. Furthermore the gas costs to battle really add up on the Etherium maninnet which has led holders to push the developers for a L2 bridge. I don’t think the gas is the issue with the value of the project though, because it is fun, and having attacks be effectively free will just lead to the person who has the most kittens having a severe advantage. They would just have significantly more kittens to volley through attacks and cool down cycles. The devs are actively looking L2 and hopefully primarily for additional utility and new game mechanics at more affordable costs. Because this project launched with a fully functional on chain utility game on day one, I remain optimistic they will figure it out. Plus NGL Ive had a lot of fun building some “cool cats” :D
Assessment:
- Rarity Shifting: Moderate
- Utility outside of Rarity: Low
- Control over Rarity: High
- Mint: 0.077 to 0.088
- Current Floor: 0.015 (~80% down)
- My Fun Index: 8/10
Final Thoughts
Dynamic rarity is risky for projects because it’s how NFT holders value tokens in a project over the floor price, and the fact they can lose value due to shifts create angst. However I do believe a project with dynamic rarity can be successful, IF 1) It’s not the primary aspect/utility of the project and is mainly used to give some creativity to the project PFPs 2) There is some control of how the rarity changes based on holders choices and 3) Variance of rarity shifts reduce over time. It looks like all of the above projects are looking to address these issues and I look forward to each of their respective futures.
Disclaimer: I actually hold 10+ NFTs in each of these projects and have minted all 3 projects and have unrealized losses in 2 of the 3 projects.
