tl;dr: As NFTs grow in popularity, so grows an analytics industry designed to assess their market value.

When I was a kid, collecting football and baseball cards, there were paperback books that would tell us how much each card was worth on the market, depending on the condition.

These were critical in helping collectors determine fair prices for trading and resale value.

The football and baseball cards of yesterday are the NFTs of today and, much like those books would help collectors figure out what something was worth on the open market in an effort to bring better transparency and price discovery as we might say today, there are a slew of new tools that have come out to help the emerging NFT collector do the same.

One of them is Upshot, which is a community driven appraisal site, designed to encourage honesty by seeing how well you align with the predictions of others, thereby creating a reputation for your expertise in assessing value.

That expertise then, presumably, has its own value in the market.

Another is DeGenData, which frankly, I find to be a bit confusing and lacking good UI, but it enables you to put in the attributes of the NFT you own (or want to buy) across a few different series (e.g. crypto punks, hashmasks, cryptovoxels, etc.) and then get a historical record of all of the prices ever paid for that item. It’s a lot easier than doing the search of the blockchain yourself.

I’m sure there are others out there, but this emergent phenomenon, just like yesterday’s post on the crypto service economy, demonstrates the wealth of innovation that is happening not just within cryptoeconomic protocols, but around them.

These are the goods and services that will power the Metaverse Economy.