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Let’s talk about the latest launch of an NFT project, this time by Vine’s co-founder – Dom Hofmann – and what it says about the current trend of technology and cyberspace evolution.
While you might be aware of the impressive sales numbers of NFTs from time to time, namely the Nyan Cat meme that sold for $600,000 and $5.8 million for an artwork by Grimes, amongst others, the NFTs shifted out of the headlines for a brief period of time, but the number of people creating, buying and trading these NFTs still continued to grow.
Don’t know about NFTs and how they work? Check out this guide to understand more.
This brings us to Dom Hofmann. Dom is mostly known as the co-founder and creator of Vine, a popular platform that helped establish short clip video format on smartphones and substantially drove the meme culture. Like any other tech geeks, Hofmann has kept tabs on the cryptocurrency world as they have progressed over the years, occasionally buying coins to understand their basic framework.
Although Bitcoin has been the main focus relating blockchain over the past decade, altcoins like Ethereum, which are purposely designed to create decentralized apps on them using smart contracts, have taken a huge prominence in the crypto world. The difference seems absolutely clear.
Here’s a list of some of the most exciting Ethereum consumer applications out there.
Moreover, DeFi apps based on blockchain technology have been the main focus of this trend. As usual, like any other trending and profitable medium, it started generating huge amounts of money, attracting talented developers to their platform, and solving many problems on their way.
Dom was one of them. In December, he started learning Solidity, an Ethereum smart contract-making programming language, and sold an art piece as NFT and thoroughly enjoyed the process. Through this process of creating he became fond of NFTs which inspired creative decentralized projects.
In March, he created a “community-created fantasy universe” called Bitmap, which became sort of a blueprint for what came to be known as Loot.
Launch of Loot
Source: Loot
Hofmann wanted to create a text-based adventure that would serve as a basis for the original video game, and in the development process, he wrote a random item generator, which would spit out names for various items like weapons, armor, accessories, and whatnot.
He had been thinking about engaging ways to promote the creation of blockchain-based art and content with various communities that support them. One of the ideas from his thinking was to let people create or “mint” NFTs from this random name generator for free, just to see what would happen. Except for the Ethereum gas fees, he would completely let people take these items for free without any instructions or illustrations whatsoever.
If you want to know more about minting NFTs, then check out this article.
Thus on the 27th of August, he announced Loot in a tweet.
Source: Twitter
This “Loot” quickly turned into a phenomenon, with all the 7,777 bags being sold almost instantly. A report showed that the loot bags were sold for a whopping $46 million with a market cap of $180 million. The cheapest loot bag was estimated at about $20,000 in the first week of this month but quickly jumped to more than $46,000.
So far, this looks like another one of those ridiculous-looking NFT miracle stories where a seemingly dull art releases, and suddenly the price goes up. But what makes Loot so different from the other projects?
Source: Twitter
Well firstly, some people started drawing up illustrations of the items from the loot bags either by hand or by using AI.
Source: Twitter
Soon guilds based on these items started to show up. Owners of “divine robes” created their own community with a store for rope purchase, of which there were only 396, with the cheapest one selling for $169,142.
Source: Twitter
And then they used smart contracts to make people sell off their individual items from their loot bags, as said by the creator, to upgrade the adventure character.
Now the question arises – will Loot items ever be used in an actual game? If so, who will develop it? And how? For now, nobody knows.
Hofmann says that games are very involved, and there’s surely a possibility for this and would be “really cool”.A crucial part of supposedly and hopefully making Loot accessible throughout different games is to make it more accessible to general media. On 1st September, he announced “synthetic loot”, which is essentially a replica loot bag that anyone can claim if that person sets up an Ethereum wallet.
Source: Twitter
He tweeted that this synthetic loot will be recognized as a way to allow a bigger range of adventurers to participate in the ecosystem, while creators will also easily identify “synthetic” from the “original”.
A Milestone in the NFT Revolution
Chart showing the massive success of the Loot Project (Source: CryptoSlam.io)
Blockchain-based NFTs have entirely changed the collectible industry, with these NFTs imparting rarity and originality to digital assets, for which they are selling like crazy today.
While projects like Crypto Punks have mostly dominated the atmosphere of NFT sales in the early times, more and more platforms are popping up with unique characteristics and interesting things to offer us. Such NFTs are now hovering around and entering sectors that have for a long time been under centralized authorities and making a new impression on asset transfer and ownership.
Moreover, this revolution has an underlying sentiment or purpose. Creators incite engagement on the platform by building, tokenizing, and giving the projects to users. And it involves no hassle.
And then came Dom Hofmann with a brilliant idea to flip the tables entirely by creating the Loot project, which follows a bottom-up approach, unlike others.
Don’t know about the bottom-up approach? Let us explain.
Bottom-up Approach
Source: Twitter / Tandavas
In this approach, a predefined set of developers, artists, and designers create NFT platforms. After the NFT’s launch, they direct events, competitions, airdrops, and many other things to create hype around the project. And funds from the NFTs sale or royalties are then utilized to expand the project further under the team.
These types of projects are inherently decentralized, where the NFTs are launched first without any underlying project. The community then spins around the listed items in the loot bag, innovates using the items, gives utility to the NFTs, and builds a loot metaverse essentially.
This type of platform truly utilizes decentralization and fuels the imagination and creativity of the users. It incentivizes them to help and create the platform in the process, thus flipping the existing NFT business models.
Epilogue
Are projects like Loot here to stay? It’s too early to tell.
It has just barely come out and, therefore, is subject to speculation. However, it holds promise to the gaming community, especially those who collect items for their rarity. And, as mentioned above, it also brings new ideas and functioning models to the existing gaming and NFT business models, which means more power and freedom to the people.
It also gives holders the opportunity to jump from one platform to another and use their gaming assets seamlessly.
Even though the concept has barely taken its first steps, it renews the decentralized dream and vision of Blockchain Technology, especially with NFTs, and rekindles the gaming industry in a brand new fashion to move towards a more progressive and free era.
Hence, it seems like the Future of NFTs are bright and shining, with tons of progress to look at in its future. Maybe one day, it will become the most prominent place for value exchange.
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