Loot: A Brief Guide of The Bottom-Up NFT
What is Loot, and why is it fundamentally different from other NFT's?
Created by @dhof a little over a week ago, Loot has grown to over 20k followers on Twitter, and has traded over 40k ETH in volume on OpenSeas. So why have these .txt files taken the world by storm?
Flipped NFT’s On Their Head
This is the largest selling point of Loot - it’s a bottom-up approach that lets the community decide how they want Loot to develop.
Basically, instead of the creativity being limited by a single creator, the creative process is shared by everyone.
In other words, think of it like bricks or legos. @dhof gave us bricks/legos. It’s up to all of us if we want to make that into a house (and what kind of house?), bridge, a Wendy’s, or hell - even another NFT!
It’s for this paradigm shift and fundamental difference that I personally got into Loot, and plan to stay here for a long time :)
But it’s literally just text..
Yes! And here, it was actually a 1000% big brained move. Because images, stats, and literally everything else besides 8 lines of text was intentionally omitted, this gives the community more creative freedom/ room for interpretation on how we collectively envision Loot.
Dom Has The Midas Touch
While Loot definitely has a lot going for it on merit alone, it would be ignorant to think that who the creator was didn’t play a role in this.
Dom is also the creator of blitmaps and supdrive, both highly successful NFT projects with Blitmap having a floor of 30ETH and Supdrive having nearly 10k followers on Twitter despite not releasing.
Dom continues to provide regular updates for all projects, but due to the explosion of interest in Loot has been posting quite heavily about Loot including “updates” like
Synthetic Loot, which every Ethereum address automatically gets.
A proposal for gas-free expansion packs
More recently, more loot or mLoot:
i like synthetic loot better, but just for optionality more loot etherscan.io/address/0x1dfe… mint with bag 8001+ dynamic supply increases at 1/10th of ethereum's block rate ~250k per year current cap ~1,316,005 no fee, just gas
The updates are typically well received - I say typically as mLoot has seemed to stir up some controversy within the community but believe Dom’s reasoning (to make it more accessible) will be complementary for the Loot metaverse as a whole (implications of this could be entire post on its own!)
So… how do you Loot?
Right now, the way to participate is by creating. Given the nascence of the project, everyone is scrambling to build. Numerous spinoff projects have been created, which we plan to cover in some sort of series (so stay tuned for that)!
From the Discord channels, it seems most people fall into three categories:
Builders, whether that’s cultivating community in guilds, channels, or making projects to create the reality of Loot they envision.
Speculators, to be expected in any project but even more so given the rapid explosion, volatility, dilution, and uncertainty of Loot in specific.
Late comers, trying to find a way to get in on some Loot action after seeing it explode.
The builders look to remain, and hopefully Synthetic and mLoot will give late comers incentive to stay, which further fuels demand for builders and growth. Speculators will always be here, and play a much needed role of providing liquidity to a historically illiquid market.
As games release, the question to this answer will become a little bit more defined.
But for the time being, it seems the best way to participate in $loot is to read up, build or be a part of whatever fancies you, and stay tuned ;)
-Nigel