A month after going viral, how have the Loot and Rarity ecosystems developed?

Author: Richard Lee

On August 27, the Loot project emerged, and industry insiders hailed it as a "paradigm shift for NFTs" due to its ample imaginative space and scalability. A month after Loot's release, similar NFT projects have been continuously launched, all ambitious to start from "components" and build a potentially rich "metaverse," with Fantom's imitation Rarity leading the way, followed by the recently popular MekaVerse. However, among the many players, the ones that have truly begun practical implementation are still mainly Loot and Rarity.

Andre Cronje (hereinafter referred to as "AC") created the original contract for Rarity on September 5, and since then, Rarity has developed rapidly. In addition to AC actively operating and continuously promoting on Twitter, community developers have created multiple user-friendly interfaces and derivative markets. As of now, the total number of independent holders of Rarity's summoners has reached 170,000.

On the Loot side, although the discussion on Twitter has significantly decreased since September 9 and decision-making faced some obstacles, the construction of the old project is still ongoing. According to Opensea data, Loot's 24-hour trading volume had dropped to $620,000 (175 ETH) by October 9, a 99% decrease from its peak, and Loot's recent floor price on Opensea has also fallen to 4.95 ETH.

A column article from Coinbase Ventures mentioned: "People are interested in Loot not because of what it is as an NFT, but because of its possibilities." In other words, the value of Loot, Rarity, or any other similar NFT project essentially depends on whether the ecosystem built upon it by the community thrives.

So, what have the Loot and Rarity communities "built" one month after launch?

Rarity has at least 6 UI interfaces, while Loot's ecosystem has stagnated

The concept of Rarity is inspired by Dungeons & Dragons, where players only need to pay gas fees to create a total of 11 types of "summoners," earning XP experience points through adventures every day, thus leveling up and gaining skills and spells. However, at the beginning of its creation, Rarity had no front end; it was just a string of smart contract code written by AC, and the so-called "play" method was to interact below the contract and send receipt messages.

One of the UI interfaces in the Rarity ecosystem

Two days after its release, Rarity had its first front-end interface created by community developers, greatly lowering the participation threshold for players. To date, Rarity has at least 6 different UI interfaces, along with 2 trading markets, and derivative maps and simple games.

According to player Damon, the current gameplay of Rarity is quite basic, including leveling up, monster fighting, and equipment minting, but "the development speed is very fast, and more and more developers are expanding the game based on their understanding." A major trading market that was launched earlier has already seen considerable transaction volume, and developers have begun to earn income.

Minting (creating) earlier and with lower numbers of summoners, "selling for tens of thousands is quite normal," Damon said. For developers, in addition to collecting transaction fees, providing features like automatic adventures on the front end can also generate income.

Damon mentioned that he has developed an interest in game development due to playing Rarity recently and is learning contract code. In the Rarity Discord group, members occasionally express sentiments like "This is a great opportunity to learn Solidity and Web3" and "I am trying to learn the Solidity programming language."

"This is the first truly community-driven blockchain game; everyone writing the game together is also a kind of fun," Damon stated.

As of now, rarity.game data shows that players have created a total of 4.03 million summoners, with approximately 170,000 independent holders.

In contrast to the popularity and playability of Rarity, the Loot community's project updates have stagnated.

Image source: @lootproject/Twitter

The speed of construction in the Loot ecosystem was once famous for a derivative project summary chart released by the Twitter account @lootproject on the fifth day after Loot's birth. At that time, most of the tools developed by community members were for rarity checking and visualization. However, a month after its release, while the derivative projects of Loot have become more diverse, the level of development remains low. In terms of the complexity of the ecosystem, community member Hill likened the current stage to "a paramecium."

The trading markets Lootmart and Loot Exchange are two derivative projects that went live at the end of September. Among them, Lootmart allows Loot holders to split Loot packs containing 8 types of equipment into individual NFTs and exchange items with other Loot holders, with each item accompanied by AI-generated images. Loot Exchange is a community trading platform that supports both native orders and OpenSea orders, with a 1% transaction fee donated to the community treasury.

In late September, updates in the Loot ecosystem had temporarily stalled. At that time, most of the active posts in the Loot community forum loot.talk were related to tokens and community governance rather than new project development. Hill stated that the decline in Loot community activity was due to stagnation in community decision-making.

According to him, the important matters for the Loot community at that time were the destruction of the Loot contract key by Loot founder Dominik Hofmann and the decision on how to handle the more than 200 "founder Loot" items held by Dom. Although the proposal to destroy the Loot contract key had passed, it still required execution by Dom himself. Dom had previously stated that he was in a honeymoon period and rarely appeared.

This decision-making dilemma has recently improved. Dom himself initiated a proposal on October 3 to transfer the 200 owner loot bags he holds to the community treasury. As of October 11, the proposal has been successfully passed, and the Loot contract key will soon be destroyed.

After gaining some certainty in community governance, project updates in the Loot community have also noticeably accelerated. Hill introduced that the two derivative projects currently gaining high popularity in the Loot community are Treasure and Genesis Project. Treasure provides yield farming functionality, allowing users to stake Loot, AGLD, etc., to provide liquidity and earn rewards.

Genesis Project, on the other hand, is an "old project" that had some popularity since Loot's initial release. The creative team believes that there are 16 types of "primitive" orders hidden in Loot's random distribution rules, and Loot holders can embark on a game to "restore the primitive order of the Loot universe and resurrect the founding adventurers" based on clues. The game will unfold in a trustless and collaborative manner rather than competitively, and some users believe this game is a good entry point for learning Web3. Currently, the project has been updated to Chapter 3.

In addition, Dom himself is also developing a decentralized game themed around puzzles and adventures for Loot, More Loot, and synthetic Loot holders, but this game has only released a thematic description and has not officially launched yet.

Despite this, Loot's price has not shown a significant rebound recently. However, Hill believes that the continuous decline in Loot's price is also a cleansing process for speculators, stating, "This continuous drop and cleansing is actually a good thing for community building."

Two modes of collaboration: AC leads Rarity, Loot is developed in a decentralized manner

The efficient advancement of Rarity can be attributed in part to AC himself and the active operation of the Fantom team behind him.

After creating the original contract, AC periodically updates the core module code of the game, including items and crafting, in the code repository. On September 13, AC also announced on his blog that he would provide bounties of up to $100,000 for builders of the Rarity ecosystem, with reward items including expanding Rarity content (names, forests, etc.), UI development, integrating Rarity into another game, and developing a complete game based on Rarity.

In addition to controlling the design of the core game code, AC also screens derivative projects created by the community.

Rarity's active developer Rahim introduced to "Chain Catcher" that AC evaluates whether new projects align with Rarity's larger vision. If AC "acknowledges" a new project, he will retweet it on Twitter and include it in his GitHub. Projects suspected of "scamming" do not receive AC's approval, such as some new projects that require players to pay for items before the front end is launched.

In late September, a module project called "RAR" previously airdropped to some players but had a cap of 21 million for claims. Rahim stated that this actually contradicted Rarity's vision of becoming "an unrestricted gaming world." Discord history shows that on September 21, AC announced in a public channel that any discussions related to RAR would be banned or muted.

In fact, aside from whether the concept is original, the different modes of collaboration are a significant distinction between Loot and Rarity.

Loot founder Dom has claimed since the project's release that this is an "experiment," where people can do anything they want with Loot. Dom also stated in an interview with tech columnist Casey Newton that he would act as "just another builder," seeking new ways to iterate and expand Loot.

According to observations from Chain Catcher, Dom occasionally logs into the Loot Discord community to respond to and discuss technical issues or propose his own solutions.

In the derivative project summary section of the Loot Discord community, the administrator also reminds: "There is no such thing as 'official' derivatives—this implies that the original team of Loot is involved. Instead, these are all created and operated by the community."

In terms of derivative project types, the Loot community encourages content beyond games, such as illustrations, novels, and music, while the Rarity community primarily expands around a single game type. Image source: LootTalk

Regarding the impact of collaboration modes on the future ecosystem, Hill stated, "The imagination of Rarity is largely limited by AC's own imagination." In his view, Loot is unbounded and purposeless, while Rarity is not.

Damon believes: "Currently, Rarity is fragile, so it needs centralized decisions."

Two major challenges for the Loot ecosystem: entry barriers and construction costs

Perhaps Rarity is predictable, while Loot is indeed, as it claims, a bottom-up "experiment."

Currently, the Loot community is trying to address two major challenges: the high entry barriers and the high gas fees on the Ethereum mainnet. Even though Loot's floor price has dropped to 4.95 ETH, its cost is still as high as $18,000, and there are only 8,000 in total worldwide.

Coinbase Ventures believes that how to introduce incentives to attract more potential players and developers who do not hold Loot is the core of Loot's ecosystem development.

Hill is also a member of the Loot community governance token Adventure Gold (AGLD), and he and his AGLD community peers are trying to establish an economic model for AGLD to provide economic incentives for the Loot community.

Hill believes that among various incentive measures, establishing an economic system is a more sustainable choice. He stated, "Assuming we have an economic system, then there will be other entrepreneurs who think, now there is a large Loot community, and the Loot community consists of people with income. They will feel that there are opportunities to make money here, so at that time, even if this person does not have Loot, he may still want to develop a game."

Currently, Hill and his peers' proposals are still being refined and have not entered the formal decision-making process.

Another challenge troubling Loot developers is the high cost of project deployment due to Ethereum mainnet gas fees. In response, Dom recently proposed an optimistic L2 game setup on Twitter, where users holding Loot NFTs on the Ethereum mainnet can declare their features on L2 and interact, saving upgrade states on L2. Users can also bring the latest states back to the mainnet and upgrade their NFTs at any time.

Currently, many developers are already developing derivative projects on the Ethereum testnet or Layer 2. For example, a team recently released a game called "HelloDungeon" on the Ethereum Kovan testnet, while another developer chose StarkNet as the deployment network.

However, in the long term, developers in the "Loot Builder" group are trying to formulate suitable Layer 2 or gas-free expansion solutions for the Ethereum mainnet.

Nevertheless, even after addressing these two major challenges, the Loot community may still face tests: high-intensity decentralization also means disordered collaboration; how to achieve order amidst chaos is something all community members are watching closely.

Rahim is a pseudonym at the request of the interviewee.