The next bull run feels imminent. Cryptocurrency prices are a series of green candles, NFT floors are rising, and more people, very suddenly, are buying and holding rather than selling.
So, with all the excitement in the air, it might be useful to cover a seemingly easy but actually tricky topic: How to value your non-fungible token. Because, after all, in the world of NFTs, knowing the value of your NFT (or one that you want to buy) is key to making good investment decisions.
But it can be challenging. Heck, even the top valuation tools out there use different methods. It may give you a headache just to think about.
If that’s you, you’ve come to the right place. In this article, we’ll cover the basics — from how to value an individual NFT in your portfolio — to some of the more complex macroeconomic factors. Because, while knowing what your NFT is worth now is crucial, having a good barometer on what it could be worth in the future is also important.
Welcome to “How to Value a Non-Fungible Token.” Let’s get started.
A Definition of Market Value
According to Investopedia, market value is the price an asset would fetch on the open market. It is often used to determine the market capitalization of publicly traded companies, as stock price shares are widely disseminated and easy to find.
However, it can be tricky to estimate market value of illiquid assets, such as real estate or collectibles. As you might guess, non-fungible tokens would fall into this category.
What makes NFTs such a tough asset class to value is that liquidity is often hard to find, especially in bear markets like we’ve had over the past two years. In addition, liquidity can be broken down into sectors within the NFT industry as well, or even measured among different collections.
After all, while NFTs may have their heyday in the next bull, that may not be true of all NFTs, especially those already deemed worthless. Yes, our tech may be here to stay, but that doesn’t mean the newcomers will buy “our bags.”
Still, even in this burgeoning space, there are ways to evaluate the value of a particular NFT. These are the “micro” NFT valuation methods.
How to Value an NFT on a Micro-Level
The micro NFT valuation methods have many things in common, but the most important is this: By and large, these methods apply to the individual NFT, a group of tokens, or the collection as a whole. This makes these methods different from broader market valuation techniques or ones that stray into the world of predicative analytics.
Often, these methods can help you determine the value of your NFT in relationships to other NFTs in a collection. That way you know which to snipe if you’re looking for one. They are also intrinsically vested in “price,” meaning the amount it would fetch on an open market relative to other similar NFTs.
Let’s start with the most basic and widely used, then go from there.
Floor Price
Floor price. It’s the most obvious way of determining the value of your non-fungible token, even though it may not be the most accurate. So, what is floor price?
In layman’s terms, floor price is the price of the lowest listed NFT in the collection. For instance, if you were to take 10,000 NFTs, with them all spread out at price points between 1.5 ETH and 0.5 ETH, 0.5 ETH would be considered the floor price.
Floor price is a good starting point for determining the value of your NFT. After all, the majority of buying and selling takes place around the floor, meaning that it’s the spot that has the most liquidity. But it’s not fool-proof.
For instance, you could have an NFT that is special in comparison to other NFTs in a collection. That means you could sell it for more, especially if there’s significant interest and trading volume within a collection.
Or you could have the opposite situation: a collection with some floor price but there’s no longer interest in those NFTs. This is a common problem with NFT valuation tools that generate a portfolio’s value based on floor price. If there’s no volume, it doesn’t matter what the floor is. If there’s no buyers, you can’t sell, and the NFT is essentially worthless.
So, while floor price is a good starting point for determining the value of your NFT, it is not fool proof. The rest of the categories in this section play a role as well.
Rarity
The second-most used metric to track NFT values is rarity, our bread and butter here at Rarity Sniper. Rarity among collectibles may seem obvious, but with NFTs it can be a little more complicated. Let’s take a closer look.
Rarity in an NFT collection is usually determined by traits. When creators design a collection, they make some of the traits in the art rarer than others. For instance, a sword with a gleaming green jewel in the handle might appear in 6% of the NFTs, but a crooked gold dagger might appear in just 0.5%. Therefore, the gold dagger is rarer than the sword with the jewel.
Art in NFT collections — especially profile-pic collections — often have hundreds of traits, making rarity a complex statistical game. That’s why rarity sites exist, to provide these rankings for creators and the collection’s holders. So, how does rarity affect an NFT’s value?
The idea is simple: an NFT with a compilation of traits that is rarer than another is worth more, at least in theory. This is due to scarcity within a collection and the natural human tendency to want the rarer of two objects.
It’s not an exact science but generally the rarer an item is within a collection, the higher its value, or what it can fetch on the open market. That means it wouldn’t make sense to sell a rare NFT at the floor, because you’d be selling it for cheap.
At the high-end of rarity are the 1/1s, the NFTs that share no traits with others in a collection. These are the most valued and highest-priced. Sometimes, they can fetch millions.
Aesthetics
Then there is the opposite of the rarity argument: the aesthetics. While rarity is mostly a statistical game, aesthetics needs no explanation: If the art of an NFT looks better compared to the art of another NFT in the same collection, it is likely to have more value.
This is especially true of art within randomly generated collections, those that have countless possibilities for trait combinations and therefore some great (or terrible) aesthetic results. Some, simply, will look better than others, and that plays a role in pricing.
There’s a caveat to this, however. Art is often in the eye of the beholder, so what will look good to one person may not look good to another. This category, then, relies on subjectivity, which can always be a danger in the space.
Still, there are ways to play this to your advantage. One way is to look for “clean” NFTs — ones that aren’t jumbled by a mess of conflicting traits and colors. Another is to seek out traits that speak to the culture of crypto (laser eyes, hoodies). Not just are these aesthetically appealing, but they have cultural value, which will likely make them attractive to a potential buyer.
In the end, aesthetics is just another tool for you to value your NFT against others in the collection. Using it, like with the others, has its benefits and drawbacks.
Sell Price History
Sell price history is another metric that NFT valuation tools love to use. Usually, it’s in the form of the last price the NFT sold for, which can be very different from floor price and typically takes into account the other sections in this category like rarity and aesthetics.
It shows a more detailed picture of the NFT in question, which is good. But in the NFT space, last price sold (and even more detailed pricing histories) can be an unfair measure for the value of an NFT. Here’s why.
Cryptocurrency (and the NFT market as well) tends to move in bull-bear cycles where prices tend to rise a steep amount, then crash down. That can make valuing an NFT based on price history a bit pointless, as the selling prices might have come at a very different part of the cycle (or a meta, which we’ll get into later).
Of course, the more detailed a price history, the better.
But it’s not the perfect method. Instead, it should be added to other tools to form a more complete picture like, really, all the methods in this section.
Provenance
Another technique people use to determine the value of their NFT is provenance or ownership history. This one might strike you as odd. So, why provenance?
Often, the perceived value of an asset depends on who has owned it in the past. This can give the asset a little bit of extra cachet, some icing on the cake. It has deep roots in the art world where rich people who own a piece of art could give credibility to the work and lead to higher selling prices for it down the road.
Today, in the world of NFTs, it’s not necessarily about the rich. Instead, it’s about celebrities. If a celebrity has owned an NFT and, especially, has used it in a high-profile capacity (like as a picture on their X profile), then that NFT stands out amongst other NFTs in the collection.
Think Eminem’s Bored Ape, Or the Cozomo de Medici’s (Snoop Dogg) CryptoPunk. Legacy NFTs.
Provenance can play a key role in distinguishing expensive NFTs from their other expensive counterparts. When all NFTs in a collection cost a bundle, who owned what can increase or decrease value.
Utility
And then there’s utility. The oft-cited word in the 2021-2022 NFT bull run, utility is often an ephemerous concept based on the promises of team leaders. What does it mean, then?
Utility is what someone gets out of an NFT, usually something tangible and measurable. A quick list might include:
- Licensing rights
- Membership privileges
- Another NFT or token yield
- Physical items, like merch
- Access to events
And much more. The idea is that an NFT is not just an NFT, but some type of vehicle or key for something else. Valuation, then, is not just about the token but what the token confers — some type of reward. The market value of the NFT, then, depends on whatever that utility is and its fluctuating value in the marketplace.
Costs
Then there are the costs. No guide to valuations of NFTs would be complete without including them. When you buy an NFT, there are generally some costs associated with them. The two most important are gas costs and opportunity costs.
Gas refers to the fees of blockchain networks. They generally go to miners or validators who make sure that the data on a blockchain is accurate. But for the end consumer, these gas fees can cost a ton, especially on networks like Ethereum. Depending on the time you buy an NFT, the extra fee could cost an additional $10, $50, or more. It must be factored into a valuation.
Next, there are opportunity costs. When you buy an NFT for financial gain, you are essentially placing a bet that the NFT will increase in value over a period of time. But however long your NFT stays in the wallet, unsold, it ties up your initial investment. This is the opportunity cost — what your money could be worth if you invested in another collection.
Often, opportunity cost is used as a counter valuation if there’s no other information out there. It’s the valuation of what could have been. In a bull run, the difference of buying the wrong NFT could mean hundreds, if not thousands lost.
How to Value an NFT on a Macro-Level
Sometimes, we get so sucked into the micro-level valuation of NFTs that we miss the macro-level. These are the big picture factors that can raise the value of individual NFTs or a portfolio even if there hasn’t been a big announcement from the team or anything particularly special about the NFTs you’ve bought.
Here are some of the concepts.
Market Demand
The idea behind market demand is simple: If the demand for NFTs rises and the number of NFTs stays equal, the value of each NFT will grow. This is because more people will be buying NFTs, driving their value up. Of course, the idea that the supply will remain equal may be dubious.
An example is in the previous bull run. The demand for NFTs soared, with many NFT collections catching fire, catapulting their values to high numbers. But as the demand grew, so did the number of collections. Countless collections were being minted every day, with the quantity of NFTs available for purchase growing and growing.
The relationship between market demand, supply, and valuation is perhaps best looked at as a lever. If demand outstrips supply, values of NFTs will rise. But if supply outstrips demand, the values will fall. And if demand and supply remain even, the values will stay the same.
At least, in a broad sense.
Metas
Then there are metas, which is when a particular sector of NFTs catches the public’s eye and moves higher in value faster than the general market. We’ve seen large metas like profile-picture collections, more niche metas like female-oriented collections, and even metas that are based around a utility like Web3 gaming.
In this case, the demand for the specific type of NFT grows higher than the average for all NFTs, rising values. Of course, what typically follows are collections that try to capitalize. After the OG female-oriented collection World of Women launched, eventually a host of other female-oriented collections were minted, riding the meta.
Metas work similarly to market demand, although we’re talking about a niche of a market rather than the whole thing. It’s another factor in the valuation of your NFTs, and if you can time the market right during a meta, you can make quite a bit of money.
Cultural Impact
There goes a saying in the NFT space: Buy what you can afford and what you think will have cultural value in the years to come. Then, simply hold.
Some examples of NFTs that fit into the cultural value spectrum are CryptoPunks, Autoglyphs, Fidenzas, Ringers, and other super high-end assets. Many of these assets don’t follow market trends completely, holding floors in bear markets and becoming the new Picassos that people are willing to hold onto for a long period.
NFTs that mean something to the broader culture (not just cryptocurrency culture) may deserve a different valuation, as they’ll appeal to a wider audience when more people join the space. However, valuations are still generally done through other methods and what makes something “important to the culture” can change from cycle to cycle.
Future Monetary Value
As you might have guessed, macro-level valuations are less about what an NFT is worth today and more about trying to predict the future. What will rise in the next meta, cycle, or cultural moment. It’s less hard math and more prediction, reading into a crystal ball.
In essence, it’s about trying to ascertain “future monetary value” or what the NFT will rise to based on a holder’s time horizon. The truth is, no one knows for certain and even seasoned NFT veterans will say that people who hold NFTs worth a ton today (those at the top of the market) are still just making bets.
Conclusion
NFT valuation is a tricky business, understandable for such a young market. Even the major portfolio valuation tools use a variety of different methods, leading to some inconsistency. But there are some tried methods that, when combined, can lead to semi-accurate valuations of your NFTs.
We hope this guide has been helpful, that you can apply the content to your personal valuation methods, whatever the motive may be. If you’ve liked it, feel free to check out our other guides, such as: