Rarity, Value, and Randomness in NFTs
Holdem Heroes is the opposite of 99% of NFTs — every NFT is equally rare, unequally valuable, and truly random.
Rarity
While there may be an illusion that one pixelated cartoon is more rare than another because of its hat color, anyone with high school statistics knows that 1 in 10k == 1 in 10k; they are all 1 of 1s when it comes to rarity.
Any “project” or “influencer” trying to tell you otherwise is either confused or a con artist.
Rarity in Holdem Heroes
Each of the 1326 Holdem Heroes NFTs that represents a unique hole card combination is equally rare — a 1 of 1.
Let’s be honest — no cartoon cat jpg is “more rare” than another one. When there are 10,000 different ones, they’re all equally rare.
Note: rare != valuable; while my niece draws very unique pictures, I’m not sure they’re valuable to anyone beyond our family.
Value
- A gold brooch has both subjective value (it’s pretty and belonged to my aunt), and objective value (it’s made of 20 carats of gold).
- A pixelated picture of a monkey has purely subjective value.
(P̶e̶o̶p̶l̶e̶ ̶l̶o̶v̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶a̶r̶t̶̶ ̶l̶o̶l̶ people hope that greater fools will pay more later, or at least they can play the peacocking status game) - A Holdem Heroes NFT has purely objective value. (you can play unlimited games of poker with it)
I do not believe that cartoons are the killer app of NFTs. And I hope to see more functional NFTs. (No, “perks” are not functional — they aren’t even defined! They are ephemeral hot air blown by hype artists.)
Value in Holdem Heroes
Holdem Heroes cards are not art! (although game developers can map stylized cards to them). They are functional NFTs enabling holders to play poker against each other.
While the market will determine their value, no decent poker player could deny that A-A is more valuable than 8–2. In other words, Holdem Heroes NFTs have intrinsically distinct relative values that are not subjective.
What are they worth? You decide!
Instead of the team picking a number out of thin air, we’re the first NFT collection to deploy dynamic pricing with Dynamic Drops.
If sales are slow, prices go low. If sales are on fire, prices go higher!
Randomness…or not
In 99% of so-called “generative” NFT projects, the NFTs minted are not random at all. The metadata is simply not revealed to the public until the contract owner has set the tokenURI (“the reveal”).
It’s not random. It’s inside knowledge.
Furthermore, it’s a myth that images are generated on-chain — that would be complex and expensive. In almost every case, NFT images and metadata are pre-generated well before the NFT sale. Therefore, the sale is not random — the developers and team know the token IDs of the so called “rare”/valuable ones in advance.
Randomness in Holdem Heroes
You can mint a random Holdem Heroes NFT (or up to six per address) in the launch sale starting April 20th (yes, 4/20).
Yes, we do mean random.
The token IDs to be minted are shuffled with the best blockchain randomness methodology available — xFUND’s Verified Open Randomness. (Disclaimer: I have worked for Unification). It’s publicly verifiable that even the contract deployer doesn’t know the order of NFTs being minted.
Upon deployment of the Holdem Heroes NFT contract, the VOR contract is called to randomly shuffle the order of token IDs. The card identities will be automatically revealed by the contract after 72 hours.
Not dev “magic”. Smart contract logic.
And yes — the poker game too, runs on state-of-the-art on-chain randomness.
Fair mint. Fair play. Fair game!
