Daily Loot #9 - Sept 12, 2021
Fractionalized Loot ($FLOOT) and ideas for taming the explosion of derivatives.
Welcome back to the Daily Loot! And apologies for the late posting (long day with the fam). In today’s newsletter, we’ll talk about a new project to fractionalize Loot bags, and a range of ideas about how to expand the Loot metaverse in a sustainable way.
Fractionalized Loot ($FLOOT)
Not everyone has 5 or 6 ETH to buy a bag of original Loot. But now there’s a way to own a piece of a floor bag, thanks to a new project called $FLOOT:
How do you get some $FLOOT? According to the thread, which has all the details, you buy a “Familiar,” a derivative NFT representing a creature with 5 traits. Then, in coming weeks, you can claim 110k $FLOOT for each Familiar, representing shares in floor Loot bags that the project will purchase.
Bringing value to derivatives
Soon after the original Loot bags were minted and people started going crazy over the concept, we saw a wild proliferation of derivative projects: Realms, Abstract Loot, xLoot, mLoot, Maps and Characters and Hymns and Gems and on and on. The surprising speed and volume of it all grabbed attention across crypto and suggested that Loot was not just a set of NFTs but a bigger phenomenon:
Still, it costs gas to mint all of these NFTs, and Ethereum these days is congested, often to the point of uselessness. Are there too many metaverse Legos being pumped out, and is it too expensive to fit them together?
The developers of Realms, an early derivative project, put the problem succinctly:
With dozens of Loot derivatives all existing on ETH Layer 1, we have most of the pieces to build it but ever-rising gas fees have stymied us with the prohibitive costs to share data, take on-chain actions, and overall explore the true potential for what is possible with Loot.
Another issue is fragmentation: These derivative NFTs aren’t necessarily linked to Loot bags. Owners who want to collect the derivatives for their bags need to chase them down individually. It’s a hassle. And in the absence of some kind of framework that unifies it all, the value of the derivatives is going down.
So people are thinking about solutions.
Loot Character recently released their "associative NFTs” that stick to Loot bags for the life of the bags and can’t be individually transferred or dumped. And today a Loot community member proposed that this approach should be the norm:
I think this also has the benefit of allowing users flexibility - people wouldn't have to worry about minting and "ruining" the value of a loot bag because if they were to ever sell it, the derivatives would go to the new owner as well…. As the Loot metaverse continues to grow, it's going to be harder and harder to find out which derivatives bag x has minted, and websites that check bags for what has been minted will always be a step behind the pace of innovation.
According to rumblings in the Loot discord, some developers are teaming up on an API that would make it easier for builders to release associative NFTs. The solution apparently fleshes out these ideas sketched earlier by Dom.
Meanwhile, Realms, which offers beautiful randomized maps, announced they are bridging their project to Arbitrum, the fast-growing L2 scaling solution for Ethereum.
Burn baby burn
In a Snapshot vote, the community passed Dom’s proposal to Burn the Keys — Loot Improvement Proposal 0.
Two more ideas about governance are already up for debate:
a proto-proposal on Loot-Talk about the 200 unminted Loot bags still owned by the contract: Before the keys get burned, what should happen with these bags? Should they be burned, minted and held in a treasury, or minted and distributed somehow?
Role + Loot
It looks like Role for Metaverse, an NFT gaming project inspired by Loot, will now let Loot holders mint $Role bags:
What they're saying about Loot
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