Bullish or Bearish: Loot (for Adventurers)

✨ Fun fact: the featured graphic above was created by Gremplin as Loot was minting ✨

In my Bullish or Bearish series, I pick out an NFT project and analyze whether I’m hot or cold on it in the current digital collectibles scene. Today, I’m zooming in on Loot (for Adventurers). 

Coming up on its 3rd birthday now, Loot took the NFT ecosystem by storm when it first launched.

At the time, the last NFT bull run was raging, the CC0 meta was ramping up, and dom—the creator of Vine and current leader of Sup—was in the midst of an incredible creative streak, having played a key role in launching groundbreaking onchain projects like Blitmap and Nouns.

Against this backdrop, dom unveiled Loot on Twitter on August 27th, 2021. The 8,000 NFT loot bags centered around “randomized adventurer gear generated and stored onchain.” These bags, which “intentionally omitted [images and stats] for others to interpret,” were free to mint directly from the project’s smart contract and cost only the price of gas.

Some people were immediately puzzled at why anyone would want to mint a handful of lines of text. Others found the collection clever, like Vitalik Buterin, in offering an open set of bottom-up creative scaffolding that anyone could freely build around as they saw fit. 

That said, in the initial surge of excitement after the release, the floor price of Loot bags climbed as high as 13.5 ETH as collectors piled into the unprecedented conceptual project. 

Fast forward to today, and the Loot floor is presently 0.14 ETH, definitely a far cry from its peak. Yet there are factors that come together in Loot that, in my mind, still make its NFTs compelling digital collectibles to this day. 

First is, of course, dom. He passed off the Loot project to its community long ago, but as an NFT aficionado, I see his aforementioned creative streak in 2021 as the stuff of legend, and Loot was an iconic part of that. I think this legacy will age well and over time attract more collectors who are earnestly interested in digital artifacts and blockchain history. 

Secondly, Loot is multi-dimensional in how you can situate it in various categories. The NFTs are gaming assets. They’re also innovative, fully onchain art. And CC0 art. And conceptual art. On that last point, my former colleague Sam Spike once explained it perfectly:

“The conceptually interesting thing about Loot for me is that it describes a type of game that’s already been built hundreds of times before. It’s the tokenization of an archetype, a cliche, and asks interesting questions in that respect (even if unintentionally), in a way that’s actually not too dissimilar to Rhea Myers’s Tokens Equal Text in my opinion, notwithstanding the comparable text aesthetic. It’s somewhat paradoxical and provocative as a CC0 work in that its content is already in the public domain.”

This openness, both conceptually and content-wise, is what helped Loot attract one of the most extensive ecosystems of derivative projects in NFTs, up there with the likes of CryptoPunks and Nouns. 

Indeed, since its launch Loot has inspired the creation of dozens of spinoff projects like Realms, HyperLoot, and many more, all of which have branched out in different directions. For example, Realms, which started as a simple land-based game, evolved and migrated to Starknet and is now building out a Starknet Layer 3 (L3) chain to support its own growing ecosystem of games. 

As these derivatives continue to take on lives of their own, the wider decentralized Lootverse takes shape, suggesting a lasting cultural significance and ever pointing back to the original Loot lore, whether explicitly or implicitly.  

Of course, on the flip side there is no centralized development around Loot, no roadmap catalysts on the horizon, and derivatives projects don’t directly accrue value to the original NFTs. These aren’t necessarily bullish statements, but Loot was never about these things anyway. 

Realistically, Loot NFTs may trade under 1 ETH for years to come. But just like we saw a “Historical NFTs” craze in 2021, I think there are more revivals to come here, and I think going forward more people will come to appreciate Loot as historically significant because it is iconic and groundbreaking and indefinitely usable in ways that so many other NFTs from 2021 aren't. 

This is why I believe Loot NFTs remain compelling as digital collectibles, and it’s why I lean bullish on the collection long-term.