The Paradigm Shift in NFT: How Long Can Loot's Explosive Popularity Last?
AGLD+6. 34%
"When you see black-background white-text (English) images on your social feed or in certain group chats, please don't say anything—just know that this is also an NFT, and right now it's quite expensive."
Recently, a black-background white-text image with exactly this message has been circulating frequently on social media, and you may have felt confused upon seeing it. That's right—it refers to Loot, the hugely popular TXT-text NFT project.
According to the latest data, as of September 6, 2021, the total trading volume of the NFT text game project Loot (for Adventurers) has exceeded $200 million. Loot has consistently ranked #1 in trading volume on Opensea over the past 7 days, with the floor price surging above 19 ETH.
What exactly is Loot? Why has it gone viral? Does its emergence truly signal the dawn of a new era for NFT?
What Makes Loot So Special?
If you look at Loot NFTs currently for sale, you'll find they all consist of black-background white-text files. You must be wondering—how can such a simple and "rough" image sell for 13 ETH?
Loot is a brand-new NFT project recently announced on Twitter by @dhof (Dom Hofmann), the founder of Vine. The Loot Bag is a black-background white-text TXT file launched by Loot, composed of a randomly generated set of adventurer loot. It can be obtained through contract code. These 8 lines of text each represent 8 common equipment slots for game characters—weapons, chest armor, helmets, waist armor, foot armor, hand armor, necklaces, rings, and more—with randomly distributed rarity attributes.
There are 8,000 Loot Bags NFT in total. #1 through #7777 can be claimed by anyone, while #7778 through #8000 (222 tokens) are currently reserved for the contract deployer. (All publicly claimable Loot NFTs were claimed within four hours.)
To generate randomized rarity, the contract assigns each owner a token ID, and each Loot can add prefix or suffix content based on the hash value of your "token" ID—there is a 42% chance of a suffix and an 8.7% chance of a prefix. (Prefixes are rarer.)
The above only explains what Loot is. What makes Loot special?
The Loot website provides a very concise explanation: "Loot is unique and the first of its kind with no company, no art, no team, and no attributes. It is unfiltered, uncensorable building blocks for stories, experiences, games, and more—pursuing complete decentralization, provided free to the community."
Specifically, in the author's view, the biggest differentiator of Loot compared to other NFT projects is "fair mint." What does fair mint mean? The NFT series is not distributed through market sales—instead, users directly mint through the contract themselves. According to founder @dhof's original introduction on Twitter, this is manifested in several key points: 1) It is free for anyone to claim; 2) Besides paying gas fees, minters have no other costs; 3) Loot must be minted directly through the contract on @etherscan.
Therefore, Loot is attempting to present a cryptographically native form to players, subverting the previous construction logic of NFT, and redefining community attributes.
On September 5th, Multicoin Capital announced the purchase of Loot NFT project worth tens of millions of USD. Their investment logic is simple: they believe Loot is the first investable crypto-native game.
The Logic Behind Loot's Explosion
Since Loot (for Adventurers) began circulating on the Opensea secondary market, trading volume has repeatedly broken records, dominating the #1 spot, and the floor price has risen to above 19 ETH. As of September 6th, in just a few days Loot's total trading volume has exceeded $200 million. The project has now surpassed 0N1 Force, Vee Friends, Pudgy Penguins, and Rarible, ranking 9th in all-time NFT collectibles trading volume.
Opensea market Loot trading volume ranks #1 in the past 7 days
Why has Loot garnered so much attention? What draws so many players to trade?
Cao Yin's观点in a recent livestream can succinctly answer this question: "The emergence of Loot is like Uniswap—Uniswap's arrival brought a new paradigm for financial trading, and Loot constructs a new paradigm for NFT, opening a new era of NFT composability."
If, as many say, Loot is merely a fun community experiment for founder @dhof, then for the NFT space, it represents a new paradigm shift.
Typically, the creative logic of NFT is top-down. Creators (artists) create profile picture images, in-game items, or art NFT, then attach value to the NFT by building and expanding ecosystems and creating incentives—such as sending airdrops and growing their fan base—thereby increasing the scarcity of NFT. The value of NFT primarily depends on the creator's team.
Loot vs. typical NFT construction method. Source: twitter@Tandavas
Loot, on the other hand, follows a bottom-up construction logic, pursuing complete decentralization. @dhof created a canvas and handed the paintbrush to collectors to paint, creating their own stories and content—such as writing novels, building metaverses, creating profile pictures, and setting up games. Therefore, unlike previous NFT projects, Loot's value is determined by the community.
You can think of it this way: Loot provides simple 8 lines of text—8 building blocks—and all community participants can build anything they want based on these 8 blocks.
If you browse Loot's Twitter account, you will see a bottom-up creative ecosystem on display. Twitter users have created various new Loot works based on Loot's basic elements: hand-drawn paintings, prop accessories, AI-generated pixel art, and even T-shirts.
All of the above are organic products of the Loot community's self-generated growth. Creators can build anything based on Loot—this is the root cause of Loot's rapid expansion. In a short period, enough creative directions and storylines have already emerged from Loot's metadata, and how these storylines interact is unknown yet exciting.
New Hype? New Era?
Loot's explosive popularity and innovative model have sparked another wave in the NFT space—is it just a new play-for-hype scheme, or the dawn of a new NFT era?
In just about a week, numerous Loot derivatives and large-scale community projects have already emerged, such as the community governance token AGLD, an app that color-codes Loot, a frontend Loot auction house called The Grand Exchange, and more. Loot project founder @dhof also launched a dynamic supply project called More Loot (MLOOT) on September 4th, with token IDs starting from 8001, dynamically minted at 1/10 of Ethereum's block rate, approximately 250,000 per year.
Although the AGLD token price and Loot floor price have both declined recently, the discussion Loot has sparked in the industry remains hot.
Some believe Loot may simply be a new market hype play, with players FOMO-ing in; but others are very bullish on Loot, believing it can bring deep, meaningful "innovation."
"Loot looks like TXT on the surface, but it's actually the infrastructure for NFT chain games, an iteration of JPG projects like BAYC." Loot player Archimedes expressed his view on Loot, but also acknowledged that Loot is still in its early stages and needs time to prove itself—investors should try not to participate directly without understanding the project: "If you have spare money, you can buy an NFT to play around with; if not, it's better to wait and observe."
Cao Yin believes the emergence of the Loot project is "both expected and unexpected." In a recent livestream, he stated that NFT development can be divided into 3 stages: Phase one is CryptoPunk, phase two is Art Blocks, and phase three is Loot. Loot's emergence did not spring fully formed from nothing—it developed step by step from CryptoPunk, as a result of rule abstraction. After Loot's emergence, it may give rise to new forms of social organization, so Loot carries very important historical significance. Like CryptoPunk, it will become a commemorative, socially valuable core asset.
This view coincides with Multicoin Capital Managing Partner Kyle Samani's perspective. Samani believes Loot is a new type of social coordination and capital formation mechanism (a DAO), and it could be a "strong" version of DAO.
As for how Loot will develop going forward? Based on widespread discussion, Loot may face two possible directions: one possibility is that Loot successfully leads the NFT paradigm shift, Looters build various truly spectacular things, and they can interact and generate scenes together; the other possibility is that Loot fails to coordinate society and capital, the community does not build valuable narratives and infrastructure, and Loot gradually fades into NFT history.
What can be foreseen is that various different projects built on Loot will likely be incubated in the short term, giving more people the opportunity to rediscover and understand the new NFT paradigm. Regardless of whether Loot itself and other derivative projects ultimately succeed, the inspiration and innovation Loot has brought to the entire industry is undeniable.
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