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Given how essential item rarity is to utility and valuation of 10KTF assets, I thought it might be amusing (and insightful) to offer a brief overview of how rarity distributions evolved over time and also point out a few of the quirks that cropped up along the way.
It all kicked off with a mysterious mint of derivative high tops almost a year ago now. On September 17, 2021 the world got a tweet from an honorable, old man named Wagmi-san from New Tokyo:
GM frens ☕️ pic.twitter.com/77eKj3Q6Q4
— Wagmi-san (@10KTFshop) September 17, 2021
The Genesis High Tops mint commenced on 9/17/2021 and included Bored Ape Yach Club (BAYC), half of the Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC) collection, Pudgy Penguins, and Cool Cats. Let’s take a look at the rarity distribution for this initial mint. Note that this summary includes all minted and unminted items in the respective collections.
Some observations:
– BAYC is common AF
– Rarity was extremely scarce overall
– Cool Cats had an unusually high proportion of Rare items relative to the other collections
– Pudgies had zero rares/epics
Over the course of the following two days (9/18-9/19/2021), 10KTF released three new parents for high top minting – World of Women (WoW), Bored Ape Kennel Club (BAKC), and 0N1 Force.
Interestingly enough, while some of these distributions are similar to the original four, none of them matched. At this point, there were seven collections with seven different rarity distributions. That leaves me with some burning questions about the High Tops mint:
1) Why did the team choose not to standardize rarity in these early days?
2) Why were 0N1 and Cool Cats bestowed with so many Rares compared to the other five?
3) Why did Pudgies receive zero Rare/Epic?
The following week, Wagmi announced the shop was open for minting Genesis Day Packs. This time there was some rarity standardization, but only for three of the seven collections – Cool Cats, World of Women, and Bored Ape Kennel Club.
Observations:
– CC/WoW/BAKC matched the BAYC high tops distro
– Pudgies once again got snubbed with zero Rare/Epic
– 0N1 once again received the most generous rarity allotment
After those two bustling weeks in September 2021 in which 14,761 Genesis items were minted, there was a bit of downtime as 10KTF set the stage for an economy that would convert raw materials into blanks and then into finished items. The next mint would take place just under three months later on December 9th, 2021. From this point forward, any items minted would be referred to as Crafted (as opposed to Genesis). Crafted included several new item types – Hats (Snapback and Five Panel), Hoodies (Comfy and Cat Ear), and Super Comfy Socks. Also, three new parent collections were added – Gutter Cats, Wolf Game and Cryptoadz.
As we can see in the tables above, the December 2021 mint was the point at which 10KTF appeared to have settled on a standardized rarity distribution; however, perhaps in an effort to be fair to the original seven collections, the team applied a different distribution for High Tops and Day Packs for the three new collections that was similar to the Genesis distributions. Then, for all of the new item types, there was just one standard rarity distribution set for all collections – 69% Common, 25% Uncommon, 5% Rare and 1% Epic. The choice of 69% was definitely a coincidence.
Interestingly, the Combat Gear (Level 2) collection that just dropped in August 2022 appears to carry an identical rarity distribution as Hats, Hoodies and Socks based on the ~8.6k items minted thus far. So it looks like the team landed on that 69/25/5/1 distribution in December and is still comfortable with that approach today. Here’s a look at how rarity varies across the different 10KTF item types from 15 collections (doesn’t include Nouns):
As you can see, some dramatic modifications were made to rarity over time – it went from BAYC having just over 5% of High Tops being non-Common to all collections and new item types introduced in December having 31% non-Common rarity. Some of the rarity decisions from the early days do make one scratch their head – namely, the lack of any Pudgy Rare/Epic High Tops or Day Packs as well as the decision to give 0N1 Force such generous rarity for High Tops and Day Packs relative to the other collections at the time. As with so many aspects of 10KTF, these things very well could remain a mystery.
