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

In 2022, co-authoring an academic paper titled "NFT Scoring: An Analysis of the Considerable Features" at the International Conference on Blockchain Technology and Applications, the goal was to find a repeatable way to score NFTs beyond floor price and hype. Despite market changes, the core question remains: what actually makes one NFT more valuable than another?

The paper proposed three scores - liquidity, utility, and rarity - to value NFTs separately, rather than as a single number. Liquidity measures how easily an NFT can be sold, while utility looks at what the NFT can do beyond ownership. Rarity is based on how uncommon an NFT's traits are within its collection. The mistake of the past was combining these scores into a single assessment based solely on rarity.

In 2026, utility-driven and access-based collections still pull in real activity, making the utility score the most important number to check first. The original study recommends weighting the utility score more heavily and adding a fourth axis: how dependent the utility is on a single company or platform staying alive. To evaluate an NFT, ask three questions in order: can you sell it at a reasonable price, does it do something beyond ownership that depends on one company's survival, and is your specific piece significantly rarer than the rest of the collection?