It began with a tweet.
Dom Hofmann, the previous co-founder of Vine, released a set of 8,000 loot bags as NFTs that were free for anyone to mint. The NFTs were just 8 lines of text in the top left of a black box.
What followed was one of the most insane weeks on the web in recent memory. In seven days @lootproject went from a wonky fascination to something that generated more than a hundred million dollars in trade activity and spawned an entire category of derivative projects. I did not buy Loot, but multiple friends did and liquidated their holdings towards the end of the week for six figures. The fomo is real.
To those outside the world of Web 3 and NFTs, it's easy to see how this could like another ridiculous side show—part scam, part authentic mania. But there's something compelling here, something that's always been core to the internet that is getting reapplied in a different form.
So what happened the week before Labor Day? These were some of my favorite responses to Loot:
Dylan Field, the co-founder of Figma, said it well:
When attempting to explain what Loot is to people, I've found myself referring to this project as a Skeleton Drop. Dom zeroed in on the bones of the idea, then invited the entire internet to come flesh out the rest. He did so without taking a cut of the transactions or trying to control too much of what happened after the drop. Once it was out, he was just another person riffing on the idea, not its official leader.
The result was a bonanza of creativity I haven't seen in some time. Hundreds of people worked on projects that built on top of Loot from abstract art, to realms, to stat sheets.
The First Fork
Compare the Loot drop to another project in the space that I (briefly) worked on last week. Instead of fantasy, the target was a Dope Wars version of Loot.
The Discord went live shortly after that tweet and over the course of a few hours the project unfolded. The original Loot smart contract was forked, a google doc was created, and people proceeded to let loose, renaming all the items of Loot in Dope Wars style. My primary contributions involved adding Atlanta and changing "of" to "from", right before the project went live.
There was also a discussion about the DAO that got heated. I wanted the project to follow the example of Loot, with much more focus on its skeleton vs introducing a structure where the founder and an official DAO for the project would be taking funds immediately.
I ultimately lost this debate. The founder of the Discord added a 5% rake to each transaction on OpenSea that fed into a DAO he created.
This is no shade to the Dope Wars Loot founder (he started the project and was clear about owning it). It's also not unwavering praise to Dom. It's unclear what the viability of either approach is as it's so early. The Dope Wars Loot DAO now has ~$400,000 in their treasury but an NFT floor price that is slumping. The Loot project now has a huge group of people building in every direction but a lot of uncertainty about how to find coherence when Dom just sent another 1.3 million items to mainnet and the discord erupted.
The Art and Challenge of a Skeleton Drop
You can make the claim that Ethereum, Bitcoin, and even the initial World Wide Web protocol are all a kind of skeleton drop. The creators of each dropped the most essential part of their idea then stepped back as official owners as they trusted the world to build itself.
What's novel about Loot is the speed of commercialization. Imagine getting an invite to a brand new outdoor festival (like Burning Man) and on day one, it's amazing. Everyone is there because they love the work of the organizer. On day two, it's even more fun—people realize there are many more ways to build and collaborate than they thought as they start making guilds and art for everyone in the community. But on day four, things start to get weird. A friend in a separate camp just sold his, previously free, camp spot for a Maserati. From there things go bananas, a new group of people spend an outrageous amount to enter the festival and the price of each camp spot become the fixation.
The dynamics have a way of cannibalizing incentives.
Loot took hold of the internet last week because it raises so many fun and brutal questions about what is being built for the new web and why.
Can you make an amazing game by starting with the loot then working backwards? Is it possible to build a new category of IP from the bottom up?
Or is Loot the worst parts of game culture combined with the worst parts of crypto culture? Has the ETH gotten to people's heads? If we create "a world of more exclusive groups based on even more exclusive assets" what are we really doing here?
These questions are targeted towards a role playing game project that's 9 days old but they can just as easily apply to many projects in Web 3.
What's amazing is we're already starting to see projects launch that address some of the flaws in the Loot launch. Projects like "Heroes" from Mirror which assure an NFT drop is for verified profiles and can't be immediately taken over by bots.
The beauty of Loot is that if it falls apart, after flying past a trade volume of a quarter billion dollars in USD, it will provide invaluable lessons on how to structure projects in the future.
If Loot and More Loot evolve, if they find a way to incentivize a broader community to make a great game (or games), then this will also provide invaluable lessons on how to steward projects in the future.
Dom is burning the keys. For the people sitting on a handful of SVG text files currently valued at $25,000+ each, the quest is on.
And PS. If you're a Loot holder/whale, and want to talk about ways to bring in others beyond ETH, DMs are open.
Special thanks to @caro and @casualdiego for the edits. Shout out to @jstn, @john_c_palmer, @strangechances, @shahruz, @jacksondame, @jmj, @drewcoffman, @parisrouz, @kylebrussell, @dgreenberg, @benhuh, and @zoink for the inspiration.