DAOrayaki Reserach |Loot: From a text file to a fully decentralized community

15 min readSep 8, 2021

DAOrayaki DAO Research Grant：

Fund Address: 0xCd7da526f5C943126fa9E6f63b7774fA89E88d71

Voting Result：DAO Committee Yes

Grant Amount： 120USD

Category: Loot, Bored Ape Yacht Club, NFTs, top-down and bottom up approaches, Blitmaps, Nouns, Supdrive, meta-MMORPG, Gaming, Metaverse, 0xinventory.app, $AGLD, The Grand Exchange

Contributor：Jones, julie @Daorayaki

Chinese Version:https://daorayaki.org/untitled-6/

Intro

What the heck is this? and why are they selling for thirteen ETH or over fifty thousand dollars? Well what we can tell you is that this NFT project is called “loot” and it could be one of the most important NFTs we have ever seen created. In this post, we’ll be breaking down the NFT project called “loot”. These NFTs have taken the community by storm and a lot of people are asking what these are exactly? it can get a little technically confusing there’s some crypto nerd talk in there, so we’ll be breaking down everything in simple terms for you.

What is Loot?

Before we dig into details let us start with the abstract definition of Loot, Loot is a newly created Ethereum-based NFT project that has captured the crypto community’s attention in just a matter of days. At the same time, Loot is an absolutely meta-MMORPG with great prospects for developing from a game into a metaverse based on the blockchain of the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalisation

So this NFT project has recently hit the community by storm. This NFT just looks on the bare look just a text file a picture of a couple phrases or a couple words. As we can see an example of a loot NFT down below.

This is what it looks like. It is just a bunch of words or phrases that are all compiled together as one text file. This NFT project contains 8,000 unique NFTs that are all text files of different randomized generated gear. Now the gear is only phrased within words and it is up to the user who ends up purchasing the NFT to interpret what to build on top of that.

On the loot website there is a good explanation of what is loot loot is a collection of 8,000 unique “bags” of adventure gear originally released by “Dom Hoffman” and if you don’t know who “Dom Hoffman” is that is actually the creator the co-founder of “vine” he has also created a lot more unique NFTs within the space and considered as one of the leading innovators within NFTs. At release, anyone could claim one of the loot bags just for gas and all bags were claimed in under four hours.

Each loot bag contains eight items for an adventurer’s chest, food, hand, head, neck, ring, waist, and weapon. As you can see, that just provided a definition of basically what the NFT project is right ?

You still may be confused as to what exactly it is? The idea behind this project was to provide a community a set of parameters which is those text files that contain those eight different pieces of words or phrases for then the community to interpret whatever to build on top of that.

On august 27th, the Loot project started with a tweet from “Dom Hofmann”, an entrepreneur and programmer better known as the create of Vine

In it, he mentioned a text-based game where you can farm NFTs and even invited those interested to “jam on this over the weekend”

On the same day, “Dom” tweeted out without any warning no website no rarity tools or anything like that just a straight up tweet for the project loot randomized adventure gear no images or stats intentionally omitted for others to interpret no fee just gas 8,000 bags in total available via contract not audited mint at your own risk.

This was the only promotion that was done for the project itself, just this tweet announcing the actual release of the project and that’s it. Loot was designed just to be a bare bones piece of parameters for the community to end up building on; the idea behind this project was to set the most simplest sets of barriers or actual building blocks for a community or any other project to be built on. Think of this as more of a just a community or social experiment rather than an official complete NFT.

Why is it popular ?

One of the main reasons for Loot’s growing popularity is what you may call the “Dom effect”. In recent weeks, Dom has created a handful of innovative NFT projects that have quickly amassed a cult following. These projects include:

- Blitmaps — a community-crafted sci-fi fantasy universe.

- Nouns DAO — an experimental avatar-a-day project.

- Supdrive — an on-chain fantasy game console.

Such a reputation has resulted in many fans of the aforementioned projects immediately jumping at the opportunity to mint from Dom’s next experiment. The Loot project went viral as a result .

Loot’s distinguishing feature is that within the meta-MMORPG, players use NFTs to create their own scenarios for the worlds they themselves have created. These worlds combine into a real metaverse, where the player can be anyone and do anything. This fundamentally changes the paradigm familiar to the NFT space.

People then started telling friends and colleagues about Loot, and as interest spiked these word-of-mouth convos spread like wildfire among the NFT ecosystem. Loot’s “You can do whatever you want” mantra was (and remains) welcoming to all strips of Ethereum-savvy Web3 dreamers, a reality which has surely factored into the project’s rapid ascension and decentralized worldbuilding efforts.

Open culture legos!

Because of the open nature of Loot and its smart contract infrastructure, the project is a “culture lego” that can be readily connected with other Web3 projects.

For example, in the fanfic illustration below you can see Bitmaps (the picture on the wall), Nouns (the character), and Loot (the items) all mashed up together. Is this a taster of what’s to come?

For that, we will have to wait and see. In the meantime tons of community projects have already popped up and built new resources for Loot users. A few early highlights here include:

- 0xinventory.app — a tool for color-coding Loot items by rarity.

- $AGLD — Adventure Gold, a governance token for storybuilding that is already being used to vote on Loot Chapter 1.

- The Grand Exchange — a front-end Loot auction house underpinned by the Zora protocol that paves the way to group bids on Loot items via PartyBid (as PartyBid only supports Zora- or Foundation-based auction infra currently).

Top-Down & Bottom Up Approach

As you know most projects in NFTs right now are mostly complete, the way it works is that you have a NFT that is released by a centralized authority whether it be Bored Ape Yacht Club let’s use it for an example releases set pieces of art and once an owner purchases that they already have access to the complete character design as well as whatever future airdrops or additions that the token may receive from the actual creators of Bored Ape Yacht Club itself. So it is up to the team of Bored Ape Yacht Club to deliver that value and essentially provide value to that token. In Loot’s case scenario the creator of loot decided to provide just the most basic bare-bone needs for an NFT project for the community to then build upon.

So there’s a different approach going on here, you have a top-down approach with Bored Ape Yacht Club, where the creator essentially has to provide the value and innovations within that NFT and loot which is really a bottom-up approach allows the collector and the people who actually own the pieces in the community to build the value of the NFT.

With this project launching and the whole concept behind it there was a lot of speculation and a lot of interest coming out from outside sources as well as a lot of crypto nerds, because this is a chest of true decentralization in a sense, there is no central authority giving value to this NFT it is the most bare-bone aspect of an NFT and it allows for the community, it allows for the people that are within this NFT community to build out the project itself and that is the big “what if” whether the community will be able to sustain something in the long term and actually create something that is worth value or if this project will completely fail it is totally up to the community to end up deciding that.

Building on Top of Loot NFT

Some of the cool things we have seen is that there’s already derivatives being taken place for this project. So whatever’s based on the loot, you can build on top of that being the building block of that NFT project and there’s people like MOE who have created AI pixel art for the loot project.

So whatever’s in your loot quote unquote “those little items and everything” like the tweet shows, he has been creating pixelated art version of showcasing what they could possibly look like and there’s many other derivatives that are currently being made out right now to build the community or build the sustaining model of loot itself.

This tweet simply explains what the loot project is at its core. It is a social experiment for the community, it’s to see how powerful is a community really? How powerful is a community within the whole ecosystem of decentralization? This project has the potential to be something so innovative and creative that has sparked the attention of so many crypto natives and people even outside of the crypto space.

Now we know it may seem like a meme from afar, but at the end of the day this may be one of the most important projects we have ever seen created in terms of its concept, not the actual reality of what it is but the concept behind it of it actually being a test of whether or not a community is able to build out this ecosystem this universe for the bare bones of that NFT.

Vitalik likes Loot

One of the extremely interesting things is that “Vitalik” was actually doing an AMA and if you don’t know who “Vitalik” is the founder of ethereum and in response to a question he said “I think the loot project philosophy has it right pretty much anything that anyone creates exists what matters is to what extent other people build upon it. There is absolute truth in that once an object exists what you can do with it is limited by the rules coded into that object, but the question of which objects matter is decided by much fuzzier forces”.

In his opinion, the project already exists as the foundation of a game and now it’s up to the community to determine what happens next. Next-level interactivity.

Kind of similar to what the whole purpose of “ethereum” was to build out an ecosystem and have others build upon it, giving the parameters is the actual foundation allowing other projects or other people to end up building on top of it. and it’s kind of like whatever happens is whatever ends up happening you know. Vitalik didn’t initially know what was going to be built on ethereum at that point once you build the foundation blocks for ethereum or let’s say the loot project in general it is kind of just this, let it free and see what happens.

The Value of Loot

Now of course for the project itself this is peaked like we said before the interest of many and caused for a extreme amount of speculation to happen for these specific NFTs and now they’re being sold between 12 to 15ETH in some cases and some have sold for above 30ETH for rare pieces of loot that contain some actually pretty rare items.

This time the price doesn’t completely justify the NFT itself as a whole. The community actually has to build something on top of this NFT to provide its value to make it actually true to what it’s being valued at right now. We think a lot of these prices are being determined in the “what if” case scenario of what could happen with this project, or it could be valued at this because it’s one of the first projects to identify these models and at the same time provide a new set of creation for NFTs.

If we take a look at loot’s website there’s two questions that we want to read with you here. Why is loot special? Loot is the first unique project of its kind with no company, art, team, or attributes, Loot makes it impossible to gate-keep any creative decisions. Loot is the unfiltered, uncensorable building block for stories, experiences, games, and more in the hands of the community at no cost. Loot pursues complete decentralization from day one. The second question, can I build with Loot? Yes, you are free to use loot in any way you want for inspiration, seeing existing resources put together by the community.

Decentralization & Community

Loot was specifically designed for Decentralization & Community to see the creativity that a community can end up coming up with for the project itself. We find this model extremely interesting because it provides the opportunity to see what could happen if decentralization is implemented within day one, what can the community actually come up with? can the community develop something that is world changing or actually something so phenomenal that it gives the NFT value? what can be done? and we think this is also a programmers and also a crypto nerd stream just to think about the what ifs of decentralization of allowing people just to build, a community to build out a project and they’re not being one centralized order of authority.

Some of you still may be confused as to what this project is. A full description of what this is loot is an NFT project that sets a bare-bones set of parameters for it to be the foundation and building blocks for the community to build whatever it wants to on top of that. Instilled with day one is decentralization, no central form of authority it is completely up to the community to add value to this NFT and create something worthwhile. This concept may be confusing to some, but there are some interesting case scenarios what this could end up being if it’s played out correctly. The questions we could be asking is can this actually work? Can the community within the NFT project actually build something worthwhile? Are there other projects that are going to follow this same type of model?

We also think this is further proof that a community, a group of people are the most important thing to whatever you end up creating. They are the most powerful NFT that could ever ever be created. The NFT is just a thing, the community behind it ends up giving value to that NFT and we think this project specifically is signaling that.

Troll Derivatives & Speculation Warning

With loot actually breaking out we’ve seen a lot of troll derivatives of this project itself for sure we’re gonna see a lot of projects that end up kind of copying what Loot did instead of just setting a bare bones, set of parameters. This will also cause for a lot of speculation at the same time it’s extremely easy for a developer to just put something out put a bunch of just words in the text file and sell that as a as an NFT to then be like oh it’s up to the community to end up deciding whatever this happens this is a warning to all of you that this is completely speculative this is as speculative that as you can get basically.

There is no centralized authority or team that you’re going to be able to end up betting on besides the community itself, so if the community is not good if the people within that community for these type of projects aren’t actively building on the NFT there’s a possibility that that NFT those just words in the text file are worth nothing. This can end up being a total failure or a massive success right that is kind of like the role of the dice people are going to end up taking with these types of projects. Now loot itself may still hold value just because it’s one of the first projects or the first project to actually bring this concept mainstream, but other projects that you end up seeing like this right that are just a text file of a bunch of words trying to copy or do the same thing that loot is doing are most likely to fail. In that case scenario it’s totally up to the community to end up building on that project, so if you end up deciding on trying to purchase one of these make sure you check out the community first make sure that the people within that community are really actively trying to build something out with these parameters and if you don’t see that that should be a very big signal and not to purchase those NFTs but we digress that is totally up to you not financial advice.

Conclusion

We hope we were able to provide somewhat of a kind of clear explanation about what this project is and why there is value to it this is a very unique NFT project that was introduced into the space one of the reasons why you’re clicking this link is because it’s made waves within the community and people are talking about it, so we are interested to see how this ends up playing out will the community be able to build something on top of it are there going to be other ones that end up succeeding which one which derivative will succeed which community will win and actually build something worthwhile in the end and is this approach this bottom-up approach going to be continued to be implemented within future NFT projects that we see.