Darren Lau: Why do so many people love Loot?

Written by: Darren Lau, a renowned blockchain investor

Compiled by: Chain News

The NFT project Loot just started its airdrop 5 days ago, sweeping the entire NFT community with simple text lines instead of fancy jpg images.

So what exactly is Loot?

It's a seemingly simple concept.

"It's just a TXT file with a black background," consisting of a set of randomly generated adventurer loot. In fact, anyone could mint Loot for free when the project launched. Its founder, Dom Hofmann, is a co-founder of Vine, a short video sharing app under Twitter, and also founded the NFT community Blitmap and the video game project Supdrive. Hofmann did not set any secondary sales fees and allowed the community to use Loot NFTs in any way they wanted, free from his influence.

At first glance, Loot feels like any other regular NFT airdrop—indeed, it was not very eye-catching at the start, and the activity of minting Loot tokens did not even lead to network congestion or increased Gas fees.

However, upon further reflection, its essence is far more than that: it may represent a paradigm shift in the NFT space, becoming better and bringing us closer to cross-compatible gaming.

Loot ultimately represents building blocks for NFTs, and how high it can fly entirely depends on the collective imagination of the community. It feels like the entire community is building an open-source role-playing game (RPG) in real-time. The fact that they have flipped the entire script is why everyone is so excited about it.

This is because Loot is essentially a minimum viable product that anyone can adopt, expand, build, derive, and complete in any way they imagine. So far, the community has welcomed this new perspective on NFTs, as evidenced by their active participation and the depth of knowledge built around the project. Everyone wants to be a part of it.

Looking back at last year's DeFi summer, where DeFi Lego blocks like lending and decentralized exchanges (DEX) triggered the emergence of new Lego blocks (like yield aggregators).

Now a similar phenomenon is happening with the Loot project.

The project's decision not to provide any official explanation for Loot is a clever and bold design for the increasing number of text-based NFTs. The community is given complete creative autonomy over Loot. Imagine if you liked certain features of a Punk but didn't like the overall look of the Punk; if you changed it to fit your style, the "identity" of that Punk would be compromised.

For Loot, however, because its holders have complete creative autonomy, people can easily create new designs based on their tastes, and the entire community rushes in to praise it for "looking rare."

It can be said that the lack of official artwork makes the community-created artworks even more unique, as each artist has their own interpretation of Loot, allowing for a broader expansion of its knowledge.

Wow! You created a whole new original language!

Loot is an evolution of NFTs, betting on community creativity and the projects that begin to form around it. It fully embodies the essence of the ecosystem in both collaborative features and creativity, injecting new ideas into a field we thought we had fully understood.

Ironically, it is just a "TXT" file, which is the perfect writing drive we desperately need; now everyone has the opportunity to expand its knowledge base.

This raises a big question: how do you value Loot?

How do you value a TXT file?

How do you value a piece of art that continues to be completed with the help of the community's infinite creativity?

By calculating the sum of the rarity of its components?

The special gear that makes the whole set exciting?

The meme power of the factions behind it?

Or even the concrete practice of a bottom-up decentralized gaming ecosystem theory (thanks to Twitter big V @Fiskantes for this term).

Honestly, there is no right answer so far, but we will definitely give it our all.

Perhaps as the knowledge base around Loot continues to grow, people will be better able to determine the intrinsic value of Loot tokens.

Source link: darrenlautf.mirror.xyz