Loot NFTs Turn the Metaverse into an Open-World RPG

Transcript

all right to wrap up this week in the news we have to talk about this whole loot phenomenon ryan have you been following this whole loot thing i i have loot david all right so there's this whole insane insane loot phenomenon that has gone on and it's really really important i think as a as a concept we don't know if this this particular loop thing is going to be the thing that it promises to be but people have gotten really really excited about it and it's taken the nft twitter sphere d5 people by absolute storm and so um can we explain what loot is first because what's so crazy is it's it's bizarre it's just a a list of text right david mm-hmm yeah if you maybe maybe if you scroll down you can find uh find out i'm gonna go to open c and just

like open it type yeah okay so we all know nfts they are jpegs we're all trading jpegs and so these new nfts came out and if you look on openc it's just a black square with eight lines of text on them and if you're familiar with like uh diablo 2 a lot of these items came out of diablo 2. short sword uh ancient helm mesh belt of reflection divine slippers of brilliance necklace of skill silver ring these are all like loot items you would find in an rpg game and so like what what the hell is this like jpeg doing with just a list of items and it's important to differentiate what's actually going on here when you buy these nfts on openc or anywhere you're not buying the jpeg the

jpeg is a reflection of the properties of the token and so there are properties inside of these tokens that have eight items inside of a loot bag and these eight items when you purchase the bag you get all of the items and so this has this is like flip-flop to what an nft is like previously an nfd would be a jpeg and it would tell you what it looks like now we have these loot bags which are just a token with properties inside of them that have that are associated with items and that allows the uh whoever wants to manifest these properties to choose how to manifest them visually right and so we have this great graphic uh by uh the twitter account tan davos who says a typical nft

is a top-down approach where the creator determines what it looks like and then the the purchasers buy it you know the nft just looks like that but on the loot approach we have this like bottom up approach where uh the people around the nft can build the game they can create the avatar they can write the lore write the novels and and it's all bestowed upon one token uh and so this is a complete like you know paradigm shift of what it means to have an nft and i mean there's so much energy that went into this in the last week that like god it was exhausting trying to keep up with it it felt like defy summer okay so let me make sure i'm tracking so far so this is kind of like if anyone's played uh an mmo rpg right like a diablo or a world

of warcraft or something like this this is almost as if that entire items list including all of its rarity was like exported right and now it is uh it's being exported and put on chain in these nfts that individuals can buy and each nft might give you you know kind of like a certain set of items and armor and all of these things but that's it it's just like the bare bones export of this kind of scarce rarity system and list of items and there's how many like 7 500 or so of these loot drops uh yeah yeah i think they're set yeah 7 500 but there's but that's also just one component of it right like there could be more it's it's this is kind of like creating a

community creating a dao in the sense that like all these people are participating like hey i think we should do this next and some people and like not only do you so are can you suggest it but you can also just go and do it and you can append on whatever you add onto these base like primitives right so why are people going and doing it though like so so i have two kind of questions for you on this like one is why are loots so valuable right now so i mean a few days ago these things were like what did they start i mean you started for free minted them for free like yeah um uh fair fair launch right everyone likes fair launches when i first looked these things were trading at like half an eighth or something like that or one eath and i

was probably like later to the game right um but now these things that you know that the floor rate is like 10 eighths yeah we're losing 12. like 12 last time i checked right before we recorded 30 40 50 e like so a why are they valuable right and like like be what like what do you do with these things why are they valuable people are speculating that these items become like the epicenter for the future metaverse right they are the first nft tokens that don't impose what they actually look like upon their surrounding environment and they allow the metaverse to come around them and this is what i wrote about in my article this week which is very much a part of the story and i think ryan if you actually go to that article we can actually look at and uh illustrate uh what's actually uh kind of

going on with this and there's a a few um examples that we can talk about first off definitely read the article uh it's relatively long but it's in my opinion a pretty um good definition for how the metaverse is actually going to emerge and we if you if you scroll down ryan to uh the loot section is going to be like most of the way through it uh right keep going keep going keep going keep going keep going right here okay okay so so here's here's what the the loot looks like on open c but there are more specialized websites like zero x inventory.app that actually illustrate the properties of these tokens better than openc does and so you can actually see the colors of the rarity of each of these tokens if you

want to scroll down ryan just a little bit more and so think about this difference we have open c that is just like gives you eight lines of text and they're all white but we have 0x dot app which gives you the same eight lines of text but it also illustrates the properties of the tokens to a significantly more degree it tells you the rarity of them and so there's actually this is a different layer upon these same tokens that tell that express those tokens differently and right now like all of the the difference between open c and this uh website is just like now the text is colored according to the rarity of the object but take that into like keep going with that logic right like what happens when a website doesn't just like tell you the text of

the objects but actually manifests the objects into a character's hand or what happens when you put on vr goggles and the token that you have in your vr wallet actually puts a a heavy belt of rage on your on your character right like this is where this is going okay so that would be insanely valuable but like now this kind of gets to the the second part of my like two-part question which is like why are people actually building all of these universes and games on on top of things and like like what's the economic incentive for them to do that right so if i'm um building a massive multiplayer rpg of some sort right of course i have to create like this the

scarce items engine internally but that's because i'm building a game and at the end of that game i'm going to charge like my customers for that make money and that's how the economic engine works why would somebody build on top of loot why not just like create their own right so that's a really good question and like we're just going to have to watch this unfold in order to answer that some preliminary answers are that if you own a bunch of loot tokens you kind of are incentivized to add on more rich parts of the universe on top of the loot tokens to give the tokens utility since you own the tokens you want them to have utility because that makes them more valuable so there's that there's also you can build parts of the universe that

you can charge for so this this is why uh my article i think i i super recommend if you want to dive deeper into the subject and i the point of the article is to illustrate how the metaverse will actually arrive and the metaverse will arrive by a bunch of distinct separate components becoming interoperable with each other and so people uh who have you know all these loot bags have minted other things and so now we also have like ability scores that give you like a character strength nine dexterity seven constitution thirteen and then there's characters which are actually literally illustrations of a character uh lucas of the editor i think actually took out that photo but there's also realms and there's realms which are parts of uh literally maps like generative maps in

the same way that art blocks are generative realms are also generative and i wasn't able to put it in my article because this came out this morning but now there's also gold and so there's now a fungible part of this like loot universe that is gold and importantly in order to mint gold you had to give the creators .03 ether and so they actually got paid for the creating that part of the metaverse the gold part of the metaverse and so i think all of these are going to be stitched together like they're all kind of puzzle pieces money legos in the same way that like defy has money legos for all the applications like the legos of ethereum just cr of nfts just creates the metaverse around the loot and this concept is why so many people have gotten so excited about it because

by not imposing a visual cosmetic layer upon these tokens it allows the people around these things to impose their perceptions as to what these tokens are and that like expressivity is as uh allows more things to be built it's like a writing prompt yes yeah the story's not written but we've got this prompt and i think you alluded to the economic incentive here so like this this is why this this week has been so crazy for anyone who's gone down this rabbit hole and purchased some loot is because it's not only purchasing loot and like speculating on on that entire market but all of these derivatives that you generate like the abilities and the characters and the realms that you're mentioning even the the um the adventure gold that you

mentioned you actually have to own um you have to own loot in order to mint those things and participate in those other products and also like these things just keep spinning up on on a daily basis maybe multiple times a day these new kind of like loot derivative products it's kind of clunky like in order to claim them you have to go to ether scan and you like um you know you're interacting directly with the smart con there is no website there's only no website to do this but everyone's speculating that um this entire loot universe is going to be absolutely massive and these are the economic incentives that essentially um like inject energy into this entire system

it's because now you have this entire loot economy and if you want to you know create a new product on top of it then you can charge a fee for that maybe like it's some fee when when things are minted and like it's very organic and very weird very very decentralized right very bottom up um but also magical like i think i think um skeptics will look at this and be like uh but guys you didn't actually do anything yeah and it's so true there's no game what are you talking about all i see is um you know list of seven words and somebody's gonna pay like 20 000 for that this makes no sense right but

i don't know something about it makes makes more sense right when you put on the like the framing of um the metaverse and this collective building that that we're doing to uh to bring it about and so people are speculating that these like loot tokens are like the crypto punks of the metaverse right they're the very first ones they're the zero to one moment and they're going kind of in the same way there's like the fat crypto punk thesis where all nft value gets gets pushed down to crypto punks because they're the ogs like the people are speculating that these loot bags are kind of like the same thing for the metaverse and so that uh energy behind that speculation can actually like manifest it into reality because if there enough value goes into these tokens like well there's enough

incentive to actually build the damn thing because of all the speculation that's going into them so weird also so cool i can't wait to see this experiment unfold yeah there is an element though of does this feel like a you know a massive multiplayer game only for the rich though like you have to fork over some significant cash or you have to be early you need to be wealthy or you can be early in order to get in on this what's your take yeah so the original 7500 loot bags like if the community wanted to mint more like as and if we collectively decided that that was a legitimate uh choice and i think that's possible that's possible for for the community to do uh and so this that might actually be a route for funding

say like enough contributors dedicated contributors rise to the top and maybe some team forms around this lewd ecosystem and maybe that team needs funding maybe they fund themselves by minting more loot bags so that instead of just having 7 500 bags we have enough for the whole entire planet to play in this whole rpg now the cool thing about this loot thing is that like when we talk about rpgs or diablo 2 or like my favorite rbc rpg was borderlands like we're talking about just items inside of that one game when it's on ethereum it's an rpg for the whole entire internet right and so we are increasing the scale as to what this where and how this game can be played so

like and ultimately rpgs are just life like you go through life you you acquire items you put them on your bookshelves you acquire new skills you level up and now we're doing it on ethereum and and that is what is creating the metaverse so bring your item bring your loot item into any game right basically that supports it right and any game that answers to the properties of the tokens is a part of that token's metaverse and the luke community is economically incented to propagate loot everywhere so we actually like the luke community actually wants to talk to you you know blizzard or epic games or all of these like game publishers and get them to support luke right yeah maybe like provide grants for new games to support

loot sure and i think the interoperability nature of loot incentivizes it kind of in the same way that like uh like taco bell uh allowed like gave out free crunchwrap supremes to doge like coin holders whatever right you've got free marketing free engagement free customers composable communities posable communities right and so like games can be like hey like we included loot tokens like now you can play our game with loot tokens and all the loot token holders like yay we reward you with our engagement and now we're actually going to play your game as crazy as this sounds like you know i think this is why the crypt crypto is feeling like this is a new unlock it really does feel like that feels like a paradigm breaking moment

for sure yep we unlocked something new here we're in uncharted territory and it's going to be exciting to see where this goes extremely speculative extremely risky nothing is certain this could just be the top of the nft markets who knows it could be that too we could look back and be like we were paying what for lists for lists of of tokens what that was the bubble that was good people were gonna build it like that's crazy why would you think that you never know guys uh that's the fun of crypto hey we hope you enjoyed the video if you did head over to bankless hq right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence we recommend joining our daily newsletter podcast and

community as a bankless premium subscriber to get the most out of your bankless experience you'll get access to our market analysis our alpha leaks and exclusive content and even the bankless token for airdrops raffles and unlocks if you're interested in crypto the bankless community is where you want to be click the link in the description to become a bankless premium subscriber today also don't forget to subscribe to the channel for in-depth interviews with industry leaders ask me anythings and weekly roll ups where we summarize the week in crypto and other fantastic content thanks everyone for watching and being on the journey as we build out the bankless nation