Carefully! Lots of text.
Loot is a collection of 8,000 NFTs, each consisting of a range of RPG game items. These NFTs, known as Loot Bags, contain a unique combination of items that appear a certain number of times. Loot Bags do not charge a fee for issuing tokens and are freely sold with just a gas transaction fee.
Loot Bags have a certain number of "Rarity Scores" and "Bag Scores", which serve as indicators of how often items are found in each bag.
Loot Bags do not operate under specific rules and are not dependent on any game or system. These NFTs were intended to be items that would be used in games or projects created by the community. This has led to communities, developer tools, guilds, market trackers, and derivatives projects using Loot Bags in their projects.
Loot has become widespread due to the innovative ideas embedded in it. Thus, Loot does not offer new features, and this is one of the reasons for its popularity. Loot is incredibly versatile, allowing everyone to use it in their own way.
Introduction
Loot has incredibly quickly become one of the most popular projects in the NFT space. However, these virtual bags of items have created innovative ways to use NFTs. A large community emerged, introducing new uses for tokens based on their own ideas.
What is Loot?
Loot is an NFT (non-fungible token) project consisting of 8,000 unique "bags" of RPG adventure game inventory. The project was launched by Dom Hofmann, co-founder of the social network Vine. Each Loot Bag contains eight pieces of character gear - chest piece, gloves, boots, helmet, belt, necklace, ring and weapon. These NFTs were distributed for free to users, who were only required to pay a gas fee (transaction fee) to mine them. Bags with numbers from 1 to 7,777 were open to everyone, bags with numbers from 7,778 to 8,000 were reserved for the founders of the project.
At first glance, Loot resembles a regular NFT project. However, Loot is unique because the bags have no official use. Typically NFTs are created for games or apps. However, the Loot community is free to decide what to do with NFTs and how they can use them in their projects.
How it works?
Loot NFTs are non-fungible ERC-721 Ethereum tokens, meaning each one is unique and cannot be copied. The Loot smart contract randomly generates eight NFT items with an assigned “value” in points. The higher the score, the greater the variability in the item name.
Let's consider this example. Below is a list of eight items from bag #6161. It contains two common, three uncommon, one rare, one epic and one mythical items. The Mythic item is the rarest of all and only appears once.
The rarity of the items in a bag is one of the most important factors in determining their value. Speaking about the value of objects, it is necessary to understand what aspects form it.
What determines the value of a Loot NFT?
While Loot does not officially define criteria for the value of NFTs, the community has developed its own systems for determining value. At the moment, the main criterion is rarity. Each of these items is presented in a certain quantity and has its own rarity points.
Item scores are calculated by adding up the rarity scores of all items in the bag. Each bag is also assigned a rank based on the sum of the number of times each item appears in the Loot ecosystem. The monetary value of Loot Bags mainly depends on the number of items and the rank of the bag. Loot Bags are selling for tens of thousands of dollars as users expect them to continue to rise in price.
The long-term value of Loot Bags will depend on the applications and ecosystems that can develop around them. Not all games value only the rarest items. Because bags can be valuable in different ecosystems, their value is affected by the different uses for each specific bag.
How is Loot different from the usual NFT projects?
The key difference between Loot and other NFT projects is its bottom-up approach. What does it mean? NFT projects almost always take direction from their founders and developers. Most new blockchain games or NFT projects will have their own mechanics and rules determined by the development team with little or no community input.
However, Loot takes a bottom-up approach. Although NFTs are created by the founders, it is the community that determines their value and usage. Soon after Loot's creation, communities and projects evolved enough to find unique ways to use Loot bags.
As we already said, every item in the Loot bag can be read by a smart contract in the NFT. That is, a bag is a collection of items, each of which increases its value. This aspect is also relatively rare for NFTs, as they are usually treated as a single entity.
How does the NFT community create projects based on Loot NFT?
Developers and fans have already created an extensive list of projects based on Loot NFTs. The potential is limitless and depends only on how you can implement NFT in your project. Implementation methods generally fall into five categories: communities, developer tools, guilds, market trackers, and derivative projects. Below we will look at them in more detail.
Communities
Loot holders and fans can come together in communities, create projects and discuss new ideas for implementing Loot. The two largest online communities for trophy discussions are the Loot Discord community and the Developer Discord community.
Developer Tools
Tools include scripts, wrappers, and image generators that help developers create their projects. For example, Pixel Character Generator automatically creates images from each Loot NFT that can be used in a game or other applications.
Loot Sound generates a unique sound for each Loot NFT, allowing them to be used in other applications or games. This individual sound of each item in the Loot bag is combined with the sound effects of the other seven items.
Guilds
Katana Garden is a guild of Loot NFT holders who have a Katana weapon in their Loot bag. No one knows exactly how Katana holders use these weapons. Guild members communicate on Reddit, and membership is based on proof of ownership of Loot Katana.
Market Trackers
Market trackers are tools that allow you to determine which NFTs contain a specific item, the address they belong to, and current market prices. For example, if you go to robes.market, you can see which wallets contain Divine Robe.
Derivative projects
Loot Dungeon is a blockchain game using Loot NFTs. By adding Loot items to your staking, you can fight monsters using VRF from Chainlink. VRFs – Verifiable Random Functions – allow you to randomly “roll the dice” on the chain. In Loot Dungeon, battles are controlled by VRF Chainlink, and winners are given unique pixel items created by artificial intelligence.
When entering Loot Dungeon, the user's Loot NFT is sent to a smart contract. He then has 24 hours to fight the monster or escape. Death will result in the loss of the Loot NFT, but it can be retained by paying a maximum fee of 0.05 ETH.
Why is Loot so popular?
Loot quickly gained popularity among NFT fans, developers and investors. The bottom-up approach promotes decentralization, a key principle of cryptocurrencies. The user's right to decide what to do with each NFT takes complete control away from a centralized group of developers and encourages ingenuity. On the other hand, traditional NFTs have also undergone changes, but their use remains limited to specific platforms. The benefits of staking, gaming applications, governance systems, and more are all practical and common uses for NFTs, but they have become less interesting to the NFT community. Loot also offers all of these benefits, but with them is the ability to use Loot NFTs as you wish. This is what contributed to the rapid growth of the project’s popularity.
Summary
Loot introduced a new concept, and it has already received high praise from many experts, including Vitalik Buterin, as well as the entire cryptocurrency community. Blockchain has always supported decentralization and putting control in the hands of users. After a long period of top-down approach with NFTs, it will be interesting to see projects and concepts that evolve from the Loot concept.
