The Loot project, a shift of paradigm in the NFT space?

Genesis of the Loot project

In late august the founder of Vine, Dom Hofmann, launched Loot (for Adventurers), a non-fungible token (NFT) collection of 8 RPG game items. No graphics, just a black image with 8 white text lines.

Thus, the Loot project is a game-like construction, an open experiment that is just starting on Ethereum. According to the creator, Loot could be described as a “randomized adventurer gear project”.

Each NFT contains 8 elements: an item for the chest, foot, hand, head, neck, waist, adventurer’s weapon and ring type.

NFTs could be issued (mint) directly from the project’s smart contract and cost only the price of gas. All bags of Loot were sold in less than 4 hours. NFTs from #1 to #7777 could be claimed by anyone while #7778 to #8000 are currently reserved for the project creators.

Project top-down approach 

Normally, NFTs projects have a top-down approach. Creators launch and propose profile pictures, for example, and then develop the ecosystem to bring more value to NFTs (events, governance etc.)

In the case of Loot, the project has, on the contrary, a bottom-up approach. Instead of the creator bringing value to the collection after its launch, Loot lets the community decide its value. This is a new, more decentralized way of building an NFT project.

Because of the open nature of Loot and its infrastructure based on smart contracts, the project is a “Lego brick” that can be easily connected to other Web3 projects.

This is where it gets interesting. Instead of being a limited, finite set, the Loot Project is designed to be infinite.

Statistics and images describing what the items in each Loot look like are deliberately omitted, giving collectors and the community complete freedom to imagine the use of NFTs. The official website itself encourages this by saying “Feel free to use the loot as you imagine it.”

As Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin has suggested, Loot represents the foundations of a game and community must now work together to decide what to do next.

David Hoffman as well published an article titled “The Metaverse Emerges” that offers an interesting view on the future prospects of Loot. In this article, David highlights that the open, bottom-up nature of Loot provided “a model for the growth of the metaverse atop Ethereum.”

Some projects connected with Loot

The community has already developed many tools and projects around Loot. For example, in the illustration below published by the creator you can see Blitmaps (the image on the wall), Nouns (the character) and Loot (the objects) together. Is this a vision of the future?

In the meantime, numerous community projects have been already launched and have created new resources for Loot users. Here are some examples : 

0xinventory.app: a sorting tool for Loot items by color and rarity.

The Grand Exchange: a front end for a Zora-based Loot auction house that opened the doors for group bidding on loot items via PartyBid

The Adventure Gold Token (AGLD): A governance token for story creation that is already being used to vote on Chapter 1 of Loot. The token has been distributed to the community via an airdrop. Thus, each holder of an NFT Loot had the opportunity to claim 10,000 AGLD tokens.

We can also mention other Loot related projects such as Supdrive, Unfineart, LootWatcher and HyperLoot.

How to evaluate NFTs Loot?

When Loot was launched, no explicit rarity was specified. It is up to the players to interpret the value.

However, as we have seen, the community has begun to develop many tools to evaluate the rarity of bags and their items. 

Thus, the future of the Loot project depends on collectors. If people buy Loot and no one builds anything then Loot will probably be worthless. On the contrary, the more people build tools and experiences around them the more valuable Loot will become.

Is Loot for everyone?

Many people have missed the Loot launch event. Does it mean that they won’t be allowed to play and participate in Loot? No! First of all, everyone can contribute into community and world building process that are currently taking place around Loot.

Is the Loot out of my price range? No, it’s not. With Synthetic Loot, players can participate in future Loot-related projects without owning any real NFTs.

Conclusion

It will be interesting to see if Loot for Adventurers and other similar projects such as Gears and xLoot will be sustainable over time. The community seems to be active, however the early enthusiasm seems to have deflated slightly as evidenced by the drop in the price floor.

However, Loots has generated a total of 70,000 ETH in sales since its inception, making it the 8th largest trading project on OpenSea. Currently, the minimum purchase price (price floor) is 5 ETH or about $17,500.

Finally, in early September, Loot #748 has been sold for a record 250 ETH… Probably nothing.