Daily Loot # 2 - Sept. 4, 2021
More Loot inflates the game world, people scramble to figure out what it means, and builders build.
Greetings!
Welcome to Daily Loot, a quick run-down of events in the world of Loot, the community-driven metaverse game.
If you read yesterday’s inaugural edition, first of all, thank you, and second, please let us know what you think. We’re not developers, just Loot holders who love the project and feel compelled to document it in some way. If people get something out of reading these dispatches, we’ll keep doing them.
Today brought a sudden (and surprising) expansion of the Loot world, progress and rumors on several upcoming Loot-connected projects, and news of a crossover with another NFT-based game world. Let’s break it down:
More Loot
In the beginning, there were 8,000 Loots. They were minted quickly (for free), shot up in price on the secondary market, and within days, many people who wanted to be part of the game / experience / viral social network were priced out.
This was obviously not ideal — aside from concerns about fairness and equity, you can’t build a metaverse game at scale with just 8,000 players — and so solutions were offered. There was xLoot, an unofficial “expansion pack.” There was Synthetic Loot, a virtual form of Loot usable by anyone with an Ethereum wallet.
You don’t “own” Synthetic Loot, though. Of course, part of the fun of NFTs is that you own them.
Then, this morning, with no announcement, Loot founder Dom Hofmann tweeted this:
A frenzy of minting ensued.
Tools were quickly released to analyze the relative rarity of mLoot bags.
And within a few hours, the mLoot contract was the biggest gas-guzzler on Ethereum, taking the top spot from OpenSea (!).
Meanwhile, people were trying to figure out what this all meant for the future of Loot and the world springing up around it. Was it bearish, bullish? Was mLoot diluting the value of the original Loot bags — or exposing the project to a vast new audience in a way that’s bound to drive growth and value?
Another big question: How does the three-day-old Loot ecosystem token — $AGLD — fit into this new scheme?
There are no authoritative answers at this point. It’s the nature of Loot. There’s no governance mechanism yet. There’s no consensus about how to incentivize developers to build on Loot or what the token should be used for (multiple proposals are bubbling right now on Loot-Talk about $AGLD’s function and design). And in the community, there are very different ideas about whether there should be a DAO and how extensive any governance structure ought to be, as evidenced by this thread on Loot-Talk.
These are such early days…
What’s being built on Loot
Some of these projects are live already, and others are gestating. (These are unofficial, community projects; DYOR.)
The first battle in LootWars has begun!
Yield farm incoming…
Loot Items is a yield strategy, too, but different: It uses original Loot bags “as a factory to produce ‘First Edition’ items from your bag as individual ERC721 tokens, once per week, *without* giving up custody.” mLoot holders can mint just once, and won’t get First Editions.
Loot Voxels: 3-D renderings of Loot items
Lootmart, a marketplace for unbundling/upgrading adventurers and their items, posted an update on its AI-created artwork:
FlashNFT.eth shared a new tool for finding the ID numbers of unclaimed NFTs
progress on DUNGEONS, a tool for generating game maps, via Loot-Talk
a community member is making topographical maps linked to Maps Project NFTs:
LOOTLOOSE is live, a tool for unbundling Loot items into individual NFTs
In the Loot discord, on Twitter, and on Loot-Talk, there’s a lot of activity and discussion right now around writing, archiving, and game lore. One example: this proposal for a Loot Grand Library. Other writers are working on narratives for quests and campaigns, and thinking about additional forms of Loot fiction.
Loot derivatives
The NFT gaming project CryptoRaiders announced LOOT Dungeons, a “crossover” that will let Loot holders use their items in the CryptoRaiders game and generate passive income.
Abstract Loot, the first derivative project in the space, is a set of lovely NFT animations generated from Loot metadata. The project has now passed 400 ETH of trading volume on OpenSea, and people are starting to decode how the image elements and the Loot items are related.
Realms (for Adventurers), another early derivative project that creates randomized maps, is preparing to mint for the public, and there’s a community meeting this Sunday in the Loot Discord to talk it over:
What they’re saying about Loot
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