Loot: How to Create a Thriving NFT Community

[Music] [Applause] [Music] so without further ado let's get started i'd like to welcome will onto the stage here and walla's going to take it from here and talk about the loot economy well welcome yeah great to be here thanks so much for the intro um i'm will i'm a co-founder of syndicate and creator of adventure gold um adventure gold is a token that is available for the loot community and was made for use uh within the in-game loot ecosystem um lute as many of you may have seen on twitter over the past couple of weeks um really took the nft community by storm and i'm going to talk about the uh history a quick oral history of loot and then the key lessons that nft projects can learn from loot about creating a thriving nft community um so the uh so what is loot loot was released by um dom who uh has uh who was the co-founder of vine and also made a number of uh nfts including blood maps and he's working on subdrive right now and loot was an experiment and it was an experiment that was a totally free uh fair launch he tweeted out a link to etherscan and said anyone can uh mint this just pay gas put in the id number you want and you can claim your loot and the loot itself was a text that is stored on chain that represents a adventure adventuring gear in an rpg or a similar fantasy game so it's these items that you could potentially use in a future game and the thing that uh swept the whole community up uh was just how uh how how how how much the community could do with it um because uh loot was a novel for its simplicity and that simplicity allowed a lot of people to envision what they wanted to build on top of it so i saw loot i actually missed the original mint um for loot i was hiking in oregon with no uh cell service no ability to to to take part in the mint um but i saw loot and it was immediately inspired by it and i thought it'd be really cool to build a effectively um like an in-game currency on top of loot because i knew that a bunch of projects were would pop up on top of it i thought that the on-chain aspect was very interesting and i thought okay let's build a um let's build a uh i'll build a i'll build an in-game currency so i created adventure gold an adventure gold um i wrote mostly in four hours in an airport in oregon um and then launched it uh live on a clubhouse chat on the good time show and adventure gold um was is 10 000 tokens that any loot bag holder can claim um in those tokens uh the id they were immediately used to vote on lore um they were also used to swap within the community for nfts they were used to permission nft mints in a way that really expands the loot ecosystem um and adventure gold is one of many derivatives on lube and this is what i find really exciting is that um there's so many other projects that have popped up two of the most interesting ones are loot mart and loot wars flute mart allows anyone to unbundle their loot items so you can you can you can turn your loot into specific items i'll quickly screen share what that looks like um so uh here is loot itself um here it is it is these these text files that everyone can work with um adventure gold was launched from a tweet on a clubhouse chat um and then loot mart lets you i already unbundled my items so you can see that they are unbundled but loot mart lets you generate these items based on your loot bags which is incredibly cool and this is how they're leveraging the loot activity on chain and likewise loot wars is another project where you can battle your loot sony loot holder can claim a weapon and these weapons can then be used in in-game battles which is a very very cool aspect because um now your loot items are going beyond nfps that are in your wallet you can start to use them in this whole ecosystem um so why did these uh appear what made them so successful i think there's three key insights around lube for all of the subsequent projects that built on top of it um one the first lesson is that less is more uh loot simplicity of the text gave the community room for inspiration the items the nfts were uh were were the nfts left a lot for the community to build like you couldn't break the bags up into items that was made by the loot mart team and that allowed the loot mart team to make incredibly interesting art and by giving the community less the community was able to take that forward on their own um in a way that allowed so many people to contribute um and that was i think the beauty of dom's experiment is that it allowed anyone to build on top of it and gave them so many ideas for what they could do next um the second lesson um about loot um is uh this is one that's very important for any nft creator is to think carefully about the tokenomics up front um tokenomics are the single most difficult thing to change later on um so for example with loot there's eight thousand uh loot uh there's eight thousand loot bags and then there's also more loot which uh and which which is much more accessible than anyone commit and um uh with the tokenomics um there's a there's there's there's a debate in the community right now about whether loot should be a dozen banks and whether that should be the version that everyone adopts or whether more loot should make a really really broad community and really uh really spread loot to so many people in a way in a way that makes it very accessible and if you define the tokenomics up front um of is will there be more tokens issued later on will there be a treasury um will there be scarcity will there be abundance um think through these things before you launch your nfp project because afterwards it's extremely difficult to change and extremely hard to to to change for example from scarcity to abundance or from deflationary tokens to inflationary tokens nouns is a excellent example of how to do this um nouns is some of the best tokenomics i've seen in the entire space um with nouns uh if you look up nouns announced on twitter um you can uh you can you can find them and they uh they essentially release one now in a day for auction the proceeds in the auction go into a treasury governed by nouns holders and one noun every ten days for the next five years is reserved for the nouns team so they've created a token that is scarce right now abundant later on with a treasury that is continuously funded to invest in the noun's ecosystem and define your tokenomics carefully that's probably one of the most important things for an nft project um currently 10 000 or so generative projects are the norm um nouns show that there's a lot of creativity that the community can do um that that that that will that will benefit the whole space um and but loot and more loot show that there's creativity in how tokenomics can work and uh adventure gold on top of it um also uh uh has many lessons for tokenomics design the third thing that i think is really interesting is that on-chain composability is the future um most nfts they store their data on a separate uh network whether that's a centralized web server or ipfs or another platform and most nfts are not stored on the ethereum blockchain directly loot was really unique because it was one of the few projects that does store data on the blockchain directly and having that data be accessible to other smart contracts is what allowed derivatives like loot mart and loot wars and adventure gold to exist um putting all art on chain is the holy grail but even just having on chain attributes helps a lot so if you can make some of your nfts accessible to the to other smart contracts you can get a thriving community like loot and that on-chain data is extremely important if you want a derivative ecosystem because um the on-chain data allows the community to um to to build on top of it in a in a in a in a crypto-native way those are my three most important lessons from loot and adventure gold one less is more um give the community room for inspiration two think carefully about tokenomics upfront look at examples beyond uh ten thousand profile picture drops look at more loot look at nouns look at other projects that have played with tokenomics models because that creates a very different type of community um that can often be uh uh very inclusive and fund an ecosystem in the long term and then three on chain composability is the secret that made loot work and if you make some of your nft data available on chain you will see the possibility for derivatives to spring up just like luke just like the loot ecosystem um i wanted to make sure to leave some time for questions so if there are any questions i can answer them hey well this is an awesome talk so i think we're just getting questions from the chat and as uh people hear this sentence uh we'll the latency and everything will start pushing more in but uh uh maybe just to kind of start off with a few things you've already mentioned uh it'd be great if you can give a slightly uh more detailed info on how nouns work so we got a couple questions around that so just walk us through what that looks like and then maybe to back up a little bit it'd be also great for those of us who don't know what loot is to just kind of go into how loot started and sort of what it is now and sort of what people have done so you talked about the decide of how you got into this ecosystem from the loot side but what else has happened in the ludicrous system from other efforts yep that sounds great i'll start with the questions about the loot ecosystem um so the loot ecosystem you can i'll screen share again um so as i mentioned before let's see i'll pull this up quickly great um yeah so so every single loop bag has these items and these items that you see are all available on chain so anyone can query any any other project can query these items on chain so this is how loot mart was able to operate because if you have a katana it can access loot mart can access the data inside of loot and this is what i'm referring to when i talk about engine composibility and this is what's incredibly interesting um loot mart and loot wars are just two of many derivatives you can find all derivatives at lootproject.com and this should give you a good sense of the types of development in the ecosystem it's really really incredible here is every single derivative of blue so we have everything from ability scores to abstract loot which made generative art based on loot to characters for loot companions for loot um you name it the list goes on and on and on of people who are inspired by loot and every single part of this is leveraging the on-chain composability um there's also different guilds which is really interesting um guilds of loot holders came together to to uh for like katanas or four divine robes um uh to uh to allow uh like uh the katana and divine robe the vine robes holders for example um to be able to uh collaborate together um and and form their own sub-communities within the larger nft community um there's tons of developer tools as well um and of course the loot discord loot talk and then uh loot uh builders um and uh bloot all got started from dom's tweet um i'm gonna see if i can find it on twitter um quickly um it all started from this tweet um and that's what it was uh this was this was the origin of luke everything else afterwards came from the community um just this one tweet likewise adventure gold came from just this one tweet and the experimentation that the community can put forward um is is is incredibly important um uh that's a quick overview of loot i can talk a little bit about nouns tokenomics i am not an expert announced economics by any means um i'm not involved with the nouns uh team officially i've just been following them since they're on uh rink b i like i i i put some tokens in the shark down which buys nouns but which buys nouns uh for the community um so i'm not an expert in this but i will i will uh i will give my best summary of what i find very interesting about it which is that nft projects in the long term should think carefully about how they cultivate their communities if you have a really rich ecosystem of builders and contributors you can get really really interesting outcomes um one way to do that is to have a treasury there's a few ways to build a treasury one is a treasury that where the payments from secondary sales such as openc royalties go to the project that's what some projects do there's a discussion there were votes in the loot community about whether that should occur for loot another way also is to reserve some nfts for the for the community where the nfts are put in a treasury and the nfts can be can be used by the whole ecosystem the really clever part about nouns is that most nft projects it's just a mint and the team gets some east from the mint um or sometimes nothing like uh dom gave away loot for free and i gave away adventure gold for free um and then that's it whereas with nouns they do an auction every single day and that auction allows them to build up a treasury that they can go use to fund builders inside the noun's ecosystem spread the word about nouns um and uh nouns is able to accomplish this because they're releasing one noun every day they didn't really sell nouns at once they instead released them they're releasing them in small batches and uh these these batches drive community these batches scale the community in a deliberate way um and it allows them it allows them to uh to to to scale the community up um from there so i think that um the 10 000 profile picture drops where everyone claims for gas and the or or a small amount of beef and the craters uh make money off secondary sales is a model that can use a lot of innovation and i'm really excited for everyone listening here to think about ways to innovate on that nouns is one example one noun a day well ten nouns uh one one noun out of every ten is reserved for the team the proceeds go to a treasury there's so many other options um and i hope that we as a community can move towards um something that uh helps build sustainable nfd projects in the long term and rewards people for contributions rather than gas wars i think that we'll get to that uh position as a community um and innovation like nouns and loot is just the start absolutely um one other kind of question i always have two more and then we'll uh we'll wrap it up and let you get back to your day um what are some kind of lessons learned from launching adventure gold and what's the community reaction like and sort of uh just what happened there post post that tweet and uh if you could do something differently what would you have done yeah that's a great question um so um i had no idea how big adventure gold would get i wrote it in four hours in an airport i launched it live on a clubhouse call i i i the day i launched it i ended up running support for 24 hours straight i'd woken up at 5am that day and i went to sleep at 5am that day i was uh not expecting the way adventure gold played out by any means um i think that the thing that was really good about adventure gold was that it was a fair launch um it was something where i didn't reserve any adventure gold for myself i owned some loot and owning that lube gave me some adventure gold but i didn't reserve any adventure gold for myself and i think that allowed it to be adopted by the community um because it wasn't about anyone making money it was about doing something good for the community and i think that fair launches especially for nft derivatives is very important um because it shows that these are not cash grabs these are instead ways to ways to further the whole ecosystem that everyone cares about um the interesting part is i expected adventure gold holders and loot holders to have a lot of overlap and initially every loot holder could claim adventure gold but uh the groups diverged so much where after a few days only 55 percent of loot holders held adventure gold um and there was a vote on whether adventure gold should govern loot and that was split 50 50. so the split was extremely similar to the split of the number of loot holders who held adventure gold and i think that the divergent the diverging interests between adventure gold loot and more loot um uh means that stakeholder management is more more more difficult and if i could do it all over again i probably would add vesting or streaming to adventure gold instead of getting all your adventure gold up front you maybe get some adventure gold every single day for holding loot and then loot holders would be more aligned with the ventricle holders it actually coded seasons into the contract so you could start a new claim season and have a new batch of adventure gold available to claim um and i thought those seasons would be used pretty frequently um the the i didn't design the tokenomics to force those seasons to happen so it's up for a boat by the dow it's not on any regular schedule if i design the tokenomics to offer the seasons on a regular schedule i think that would have created more alignment with uh loot holders and adventure gold holders so this is why i think the nft economics and the uh anti-derivative tokenomics are really important to get right because a lot of your nfts will change hands your projects will be held by a really wide variety of people some will be short-term minded some will be long-term i did and if you want a really thriving community in the long term with lots of builders and not just something that like is popular and then and then disappears um you should like do what luke did and what i think more than an adventure gold served to do which is make a very expensive expansive ecosystem for builders in a way that brings a lot of people to fold there's lots of ways to do it but the scarcity versus abundance mindsets are very different and if i'd coded in a four seasons where a season will take place every three months let's say that would create an abundance mindset by default about adventure gold i'd say adventure gold has more of a scarcity mindset right now um because the the seasons are by vote instead of uh part of the tokenomics design upfront oh incredible um i think you already sort of helped me transition to the last question here from our audience which is if you had any uh predictions for uh what the loot ecosystem would look like a couple years from now or would you uh sort of say what happened yeah yeah um so uh there's currently a loot hackathon with like 50 different projects submitted um you saw the derivatives page of screen sharing there's like thousands of loop derivatives um and uh just because not a lot of people are talking about it on twitter that doesn't mean that there's not builders the builders i know are more excited than ever and i think that um i think that the loot community um is uh has really strong builders working on tons of different ideas um and i'm so excited to see those develop these ideas are hard to execute loot mark loot mart was started pretty close to day one and it took a while to launch um because it was incredibly complex they had machine learning to generate the images each image like took like like a like it took a like a long time and it was very computationally intensive to generate that's not something you could launch overnight the loot ecosystem takes time because really good building and really good projects take time i think my call to action for the loot community and the nft community as a whole is to uh think about the long term think about what your nfps look like in three years in five years because people move on from profile photos people will move on from all but a few assets just like in the 2017 ico bubble most icos are now valueless i think that in three to five years honestly most nfts will be valueless and the ones that will survive will be the ones that cultivate these thriving communities where it's more than just an image it's an entire community and ecosystem around these nfts so nfts are unique they can be integrated in the ecosystem in all these different ways loot has an example of how to do that nouns as an example of how to do that and um yeah think about how to go beyond images and into something that builders want to build on and communities want to create lore around and um something that goes goes goes beyond a profile photo awesome well thank you so much for that and uh i hope this is insightful for everybody else to sing in two we're already getting a lot of uh claps and uh thank you for for kind of clarifying a lot of these things so really appreciate this and uh thanks again thanks so much yeah anyone who wants to email me you can email me at will syndicate.io or contact me on twitter at willpaper i'm happy to answer any questions thanks so much that's great thanks well [Music] [Applause] [Music] you