McLuhan proposed the concept of hot and cold media. Movies are a kind of “hot medium” with high definition, but when used, the medium defines the only way of participation. The “cold medium” is low-definition, like a novel with only one sentence at the end, and then let the reader’s imagination.

“Loot is randomly generated adventurer equipment and stored on the blockchain. Statistics, images and other functions are intentionally omitted for others to explain.” This is the official introduction of Loot.

So, Loot is by far the largest “cold medium” in the crypto world.

From the smallest product unit to the smallest operable product

History always rhymes, and the 2020 DeFi Summer bifurcation wave is still in sight. And a year later, the NFT Summer “Fork” game continues.

Loot attracted almost everyone’s attention overnight, and then there were PLoot, XLoot, Bloot, AC’s Rarity and so on. Many people compare Loot to Uniswap, and Bloot or xLoot to Sushiswap. They do have a lot in common:

• Uniswap’s 50 lines of code has established a daily trading volume of billions of dollars; the distribution of Loot’s eight lines of attributes has hidden mystery;
• AMM represented by Uniswap is the bottom layer of the decentralized financial world, and the NFT form represented by Loot is the bottom layer of the future Metaverse;
• Countless forks and imitations
• Sufficient openness, rapid evolution of community ecology

From an investment perspective, according to the logic of this analogy, we can bet on Loot and Bloot to participate in this track, and look forward to the ecology that the community will evolve. But whether this “analog” is true or not requires a question mark here.

Completely different product attributes led to a series of ecological emergence and product evolution logic completely different.

For Uniswap, it can be defined as the “minimum runnable product”, while the NFT represented by Loot is the “minimum product unit”.

The operable product is the application, and the next step of the application is to build surrounding ecological tools. Uniswap’s liquidity management tools, K lines, pending order tools, aggregate liquidity, etc., are stacked like Lego blocks. DEX, stablecoins, loans, income pools, and encapsulated derivatives have built a diverse and complex ecosystem.

NFT is a component, and the next step of the component is the application, and Loot even the component has not figured out the future direction. If it is really to be compared, it is more like Bitcoin ten years ago, and it is still on the road of exploration: Means of payment or store of value?

These are two contradictory product directions. The annual Pizza Festival is a mockery of Bitcoin as a means of payment.

The rich gets richer, does Krypton-Gold Logic hold in Metaverse?

If you look at the game abstractly, it means that developers produce content and players consume content. It is a progress bar, and the game has reached the end when the bar is read. The various attributes and abilities of the player determine the speed of reading the article. Krypton gold is one of the solutions to speed up the reading speed.

The traditional game of krypton gold often leads to an ending: there will only be one person on a server with krypton gold. The essence of market competition is to eliminate competition, and the most profitable state is market monopoly; as a form of competition, there will only be one person in the end, and he is the final winner of this server. There is no room for two tigers. Then, the game is over.

Metaverse uses blockchain as the bottom layer of value transfer, and krypton gold is a natural solution. And Loot defines the big scarcity in the earliest 8,000 equipment sets. Whether everyone wants to define Loot as a “divine outfit” or “noble skin”, Loot holders will obtain privileges due to scarcity and form a monopoly. In the case of a monopoly, if there is no way to break it, the market will choose to start anew to change the order.

Loot founder Dom also noticed this problem and released mLoot. However, the additional issuance of NFTs is obviously different from that of FT: the additional issuance of FT is a dilution of the value of the original tokens, while the additional issuance of NFTs reflects the scarcity of the first batch of NFTs. The market is also clearly aware of this problem, and Loot’s price rebounded after a brief decline. The difference in name between mLoot and Loot is destined for their non-homogeneity.

For the game, the important thing is to participate in it and be teased by randomness. Scarce equipment should be a surprise during the game, not a pre-defined cold asset.

Role or equipment? Rarity may be a better choice

Rarity is a Loot-style NFT released by Andre Cronje on the Fantom blockchain network. The difference is that Rarity can unlimited Mint from the beginning, and players can choose one of the characters in Mint 11. Up to now, Rarity has functions such as roles, additions, adventures, and skills.

Loot and Rarity chose different development ideas: release equipment (Loot) and release role (Rarity), which are completely two ideas. In contrast, the scarcity of characters is weaker and stronger.

It is weaker. It is reflected in the fact that anyone can create a character. This is the case in all games. You can easily create a barbarian character in Diablo.

Stronger lies in the role of investing resources, specific occupations, attributes, additional points, skill training, levels, etc., giving him more abundant and diverse scarcity.

From this perspective, Rarity chose the role as a starting point, which may be a better choice. As an almost free project, Rarity’s scarcity depends on the addition of points, later training and luck. At the same time, whether you can find a treasure chest with good luck.

Of course, as the scarce data on the blockchain, the serial number does bring some scarcity to Rarity. Rarity with serial number 404 sells 4000 + FTM, but this is a lot weaker than Loot.

Dinosaur fights, whoever has more teeth wins

Two dinosaurs are fighting. If you want to judge who will win from the beginning, you need to see who has more teeth. For projects like Loot, where are the “teeth”?

The essence of Loot lies in the product components, and it is very important to determine the product direction of the components. The size of the community is one of the selection criteria, but what is more important is whether the community can form a synergy to promote Loot in the right direction.

The size of the community and the synergy. Early decentralized governance will lead to slow progress. Recall that each EIP upgrade of Ethereum, months or even years of discussion and testing, can finally go live on the mainnet. The advantage is that it is stable enough, but it is obvious that it is easy to not keep up with the market.

Compared to Loot’s fully community-based operation, Blood and Rarity are obviously much more centralized, and for the early stages of the project, centralization means the efficiency of decision-making and the speed of execution.

Although Loot has seen dozens of ecological projects in just two weeks after its launch, they are nothing more than scarce query tools, character rendering, surrounding gems, and so on.
And Rarity, promoted by AC, has already appeared in the distribution of character attributes, character upgrades, automatic upgrade services, etc., and initially has the prototype of Mud.

People buy ideas

This article is more about questioning. Every wave always follows the trend, but the definite consensus is that the real formation of Loot requires more time in units of years. The selfless construction of the community, new and suitable for blockchain gameplay. Judging from the current situation, Loot has only completed the step of asset issuance, and the ecology is still too simple, too single, without layers and complexity.

Copying is easy. You can copy a Yours Loot on Ethereum without any cost, but people will only pay for the original. Felix sold hundreds of thousands of dollars in candy piles and Duchamp’s urinals, all of which belong to the category of “I can make one too”, but only the first one can have such a high value.

It is a seed, and we have seen a lot of hard shells around the seed. The clarity of the product path, the mobilization of the community, the effective incentives of developers, and the design of the economic system will all be constraints that it will encounter in the future. But as long as it is strong enough, all restraints will be broken free and break through.