We Wrote an Academic Paper on Scoring NFTs in 2022 - Here's What Still Holds Up

This audio is presented by Hacker Noon, where anyone can learn anything about any technology. We wrote an academic paper on scoring NFTs in 2022 here's what still holds up, by Rumpel Kryptoskin. Back in 2022, at the peak of NFT mania, I co-authored a paper for the International Conference on Blockchain Technology and Applications called, NFT Scoring. An analysis of the considerable features. The goal was simple. Most people were buying NFTs based on floor price and vibes, and almost nobody had a repeatable way to actually score one. The market has changed a lot since then. The PFP gold rush is over. Trading volume dropped roughly 37% year over year in 2025 to about $5. 5 billion, according to a KuCoin market report, and by some estimates the large majority of collections from that era now sit untouched with no active trading at all. But the core question the paper tried to answer, what actually makes one NFT worth more than another, didn't go away. If anything, it matters more now, because the NFTs still getting attention in 2026 are the ones tied to gaming items, ticketing, or membership access rather than JPEGs someone hopes will 100x. so here's the framework stripped of the academic language with a few notes on where i'd point it differently today the three numbers we proposed the paper split nft valuation into three separate scores instead of one blended number because value for an nft actually comes from three different places that don't move together liquidity score this measures how easily you could sell the thing not what it's theoretically worth We calculated it from a collection's floor price movement over time. A collection can look expensive on paper and still be nearly impossible to exit if trading volume is thin. In 2026, this is arguably the single most important number to check first, since most collections now trade in occasional bursts rather than continuously. Utility score, this looks at what the collection actually does beyond ownership. Does it unlock a game feature, a real-world perk, staking rewards, access to something ongoing? When we ran the numbers in 2022, this score barely mattered to most buyers. speculation drove almost everything. That's flipped. Multiple 2026 market reports point to utility-driven and access-based collections as one of the few segments still pulling in real activity. So this score has gone from a nice-to-have-in-our model to the one worth waiting the most. Rarity score, this is the one most people already track informally through tools like rarity tools, based on how uncommon an NFT's individual traits are within its collection. It's the score most people default to because it's the asiasto compute, but on its own it tells you almost nothing about whether you cancel the thing or whether it does anything. why splitting these apart matters the mistake we saw constantly in 2021 and 2022 was collapsing all three into a single this nft is good judgment usually based on rarity alone because rarity is the one that's visible on every marketplace listing that's how people ended up holding nfts with rare traits zero liquidity and no function at all keeping the three scores separate forces you to ask