NFTs are all the rage this year. There’s people completely writing it off to people worshipping it. NFTs are Non Fungible Tokens which are digital objects who’s value is what the buyer is willing to pay. The truth of the matter is that the weird monkeys, kitties, bears and so much art are being traded at double digit ETH around the clock as we speak. Loot is a new project that seems to have forged itself a cult in this already burgeoning space. It’s creator dhof, released a set of 8000 NFT objects. Text objects. Each object has 8 properties. You can view all the available ones here. And that’s it. They are all named in RPG fantasy style. If you are into Tolkien, GOT, DND games and any fantasy fiction, you will relate to these objects.
And that’s exactly what happened. In a twitter space I eavesdropped on, Alisha compared it to how an author writes the book and then franchises games, movies etc. Loot is similar. Except there’s no books, there’s only artefacts. The creator just gave them away to be minted.
To mint an artefact is to interact with the related smart contract and write it to ethereum’s blockchain. This needs you to pay gas fees, which vary according to the volume of people trying to write their stuff onto the next block. The hero of the hour Jackson Dame posted a tweet teaching people how to use Etherscan(etherscan.io) to mint one of these 8000 objects.
A few thousand people minted their first NFTs due to this and collected some loot for themselves.(I sadly missed out on this). And in 4 days, loot caught the fancy of the internet. The newly minted artefacts started trading furiously on Opensea until a ceiling broke and one of them traded for the equivalent of $100,000 making life-changing money for Jackson. Other minters also got sizeable trades and made good money.
Right now, discord for loot is buzzing with activity. Derivative NFT projects are being launched every hour it seems like. Writers are writing lore, artists are creating renditions, memers are partying hard and I even saw this video of a bard on loot.
There’s a newsletter for loot related information and Adventure Gold(AGLD) is the coin created for LootDAO(Decentralised Autonomous Organisation). Nader Dabit launched his own derivative for developers. And things are just starting.
The downside is the exclusivity of the loot holders.@dhof is proposing ways to include everybody. It waits to be seen how much the value will hold with these new models. Scammers smell the frenzy and want to capitalise with unaudited contracts for shallow derivatives. As the weekend passes, the floor price on loot objects are only rising.
However, as I see it, what @lootproject has done is get tons and tons of new people into the world of NFTs. I learned for the first time to mint an object on Etherscan. Loot has also pushed the boundary of what NFTs can do and raised the bar for future NFT projects.
The best case scenario is that the community stays strong and takes Loot in exciting new directions, builds on top of it to create real value that can be enjoyed by everybody. In the worst case, it’s a passing fad that made magic internet money for a bunch of people, showed a creative spark, educated thousands of people in a fun manner. This seems less and less likely as I watch this discord activity.
A solid takeaway for me is that the NFT season is going to progress more and we will see many more such opportunities popup in the future. @blitmap, @fameladies,@supdrive, @thebearbums seem to have so much promise.
Probably nothing. Gm
Cover photo from twitter.com/nopattern/status/14329378995033..