Gimmie the Loot! | Loot Panel w/ Jackson Dame, Will Papper, Anish Agnihotri

Transcript

hey bankless nation wow it is panel time super excited about this panel it's all about loot if you've not heard of loot david could you give a quick description of what loot is and why we're hosting this panel oh that's that's so hard because the whole point about loot is that it has no description the scriptures need to be built around the loot and that is the fundamental like unlock that this whole loot phenomenon has brought upon the world like traditional nfts we all know them as jpegs we joke about them like oh yeah they're jpegs loots aren't even jpegs they are just tokens that have properties inside of them and the whole idea is that a world can be built around these things rather than have them actually impose upon the world what

they look like and this is it's really just a writing prompt it's a blank slate uh of such a possibly gargantuan like magnitude that it's attracted a ton of attention and a ton of a ton of frenzied energy and the thing is like the the way the promise of loot is that since we're building around it rather than actually building it up from the from the top down it's coming from a bottom up perspective there is no team there is no road map there is no project there's only a nebulous decentralized set of contributors who are committed to building this thing uh and so we have brought three of those contributors here on the panel today we've got jackson dame who is co-founder of excuse me the content creator and

community manager at the rainbow wallet we also have will papper who is co-founder of syndicate dao and also the mentor of adventure gold and anish agni hoetree which is one of a paradigm's newest research associates and these guys all have caught the loot bug uh and so we want to get their perspectives as to what this whole loot thing actually is yeah i think i would definitely uh um need to figure this out i i feel like i owe this one to my wife david because i bought loot right and like she already thinks nfts are crazy right but like now i'm buying um text files on the blockchain dex files on the blockchain so i feel like uh many people that are outside of crypto circles uh also want to understand what this what this loot

phenomenon is why it has such value i mean tremendous amount of value being attributed to loot itself and then also all of kind of the derivative products so we're going to dig into all of this and i i got to say coming into this i'm kind of halfway split where i like i see the the unlock of this new primitive and it's it's so exciting and so cool and and part of me is like this is the future um this is going to be amazing and then there's another part of me that's like um well have we peaked here right like it's just like we're buying text files now and there's no game around this thing and like people are pricing in the future way too much pricing in the future like how's this thing how is this thing going

to be built right uh so i'm somewhat conflicted and i love that conflict because i think that's where the best opportunities lie so guys we are going to get into the subject of loot in this expert panel but before we do we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible bankless is proud to be supported by uniswap uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on ethereum which is what ryan and i call a money robot no human counterparties or centralized intermediaries just autonomous code on ethereum input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy something brand new in the uni-swap

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a variable interest rate because it's a lower rate than the stable interest rate option but i could choose the stable interest rate option if i wanted to lock in that interest rate in permanently v2 also features the ability for users to swap collateral without having to withdraw their assets trade them on unit swap and then deposit them back into ave with ave users can do this in one seamless transaction saving you time and gas costs check out the power of ave at ave.com that's aave.com all right guys we are back with the loot panel from bankless talking all about loot what this project is what it means for the future did we unlock a new primitive or is this just the hype cycle going crazy here we've got three

panelists who can fill us in on all the details we've got uh aneesh eggnoghotry he's a research associate at paradigm will papper he's the co-founder of syndicate dao and also the mentor of adventure gold as well and jackson dame he is a content creator and community manager at rainbow wallet everyone how's it going how are you do we call you guys looters like what's the official name for the loot community doing great uh looters definitely sounds a little weird but yeah okay uh anyway it's great to have everyone you know i think we got to start with kind of the the aha moment because all of us discovered loot in a different way um all of us discovered it

in kind of you know some digital way but um for for all of us i think everybody including myself um it really clicked like there was this aha moment of what this primitive could unlock so i want to start maybe with um with you jackson so what was your aha moment with luke and what convinced you to get involved in the project and become a contributor yeah i think my aha moment was actually probably months before it even dropped like i i i've been following dom's journey and in getting into ethereum and nfts uh for many months now and i was an early adopter of his one of his first projects blitmap and through that through being involved with blitmap and the community that he built

around that i i already was sort of sold on anything don ever did in the future um and because of that he's also not one of those people that tweets often so i didn't i i turned notifications on for his tweets so that i would always be aware of what he was doing and you know one day you know two weeks ago when he tweeted out the link to this project this experiment that he did um i was already so familiar with his work and like how innovative he is that i was ready to jump on board anything he ever did so i saw the link and within seconds just clicked on it and started minting these bags of loot without really even thinking that much about it so it's basically from dom's reputation you're like whatever dom creates i'm going to ape into this thing and then go

figure it out later yeah pretty much will what about you what was your aha moment how did luke click in your mind and when yeah so i missed the original lootman i was hiking in oregon um without uh anything on me i didn't have any of my any any access to my crypto um it was an expensive hike so i i missed the night and then i was uh but i knew that uh people were talking about how cool it was that loot was fully on chain and i was like wow okay this is not just another nft this is a composable primitive um and i was like wouldn't it be cool if people could claim an in-game currency so in the airport in bend oregon before i owned any loot i started coding adventure gold um and uh yeah that's

that's that's when it began um because i just thought that on chain composability was a really powerful thing um got back was too tired to buy loot that night then the next morning sunday morning i i just uh sold my me bit and swept the floor for loot um until i ran out of uh ran out of beef um so uh yeah adventure gold actually began before he held any loot um but the on-chin composability was so cool to me that i knew it would be really powerful we we definitely want to get into the story of adventure gold a little bit later but but for folks that aren't familiar with like when you say on-chain composability right like to me i i kind of know what that means like that gives me services like okay well

this could be a a primitive for so many other things that are built on top of ethereum but like how would you explain why on chainness makes loot cool in and of itself will just just to somebody who doesn't understand this space yeah so um most nfps their data is a url and that might be an ipfs hash or that might be a centralized server um but most nfts point to outside of the ethereum ecosystem which means that other smart contracts can't leverage the data inside of that nft because they don't know what that url contains there's no way for them to access it um it's just it's just the url to them that doesn't indicate anything

about the underlying content the really cool thing about loot is that loot stores its properties on chain which means that other applications can access what kind of headgear does someone have are they wearing a crown are they wearing a cap what kind of weapon do they have what kind of shoes they have what kind of armor do they have and the really cool part about that all being accessible by other applications on top of ethereum is that like people like loot wars for example was able to query the weapon that you had and then grant you an actual weapon that you could use in battle um uh anish did work on on being able to split up loot bags into individual items and all of this is only possible because loot is stored fully on chain whereas

most nfts are urls that point somewhere else in many cases to a centralized server so other blockchain applications can't access it before we uh go on to anish i just want to add that there there is precedent for on-chain nfts to have a um premium associated with them or due to their unchainedness and we saw this with auto glyphs right autoglyphs have an insane premium versus other typical jpeg nfts because of their inherent on-chain nature right they have no external dependencies uh and so like i think people who clicked with loop might have clicked it with that like on chain nature of of the items just wanted to add that that color what's super interesting about all of

this is like um it appears for some odd reason maybe for some of the reasons will will was stating that like the simplicity of loot makes it make like uh that's what makes it so valuable and that's what makes it so interesting right so so we've gone from something that is like not very complicated at all um gifs and jpegs right to something like even more simple than that and it's that simplicity that actually makes it a more valuable primitive to build on top of right um it's it's a very counter-intuitive i think to the way people think about value right it's like more complicated more time more effort goes into it the more valuable it must be well no here's loot it's just text files on the

internet but it's that simplicity that adoption which makes it so valuable that's kind of the riddle i think we want to unpack here but anish i want to get your uh weigh in on this so tell us about your aha moment how did it happen for you sure so in a similar way to jackson i followed dom's work i'm a big fan of what he's done with blitmaps and sort of every sometime i'm a builder and so i love taking a look at smart contracts that people put together and doms are especially unique because he does cool things on chain and so loot initially caught my eye because he was doing you know rendering these images rendering these text files directly on chain and i was like hey this is fantastic and then immediately right after that my take was okay well everything is on

chain all of this data is accessible that means i can quickly scrape all of it and put together a rarity chart that people can now use immediately right after and so the first thing that i did the first sort of derivative that i built on top of loot was the sort of list of rarity based on the probability of the items inside your bags and i shipped it out to the world and i thought you know this is going to be a cool way for people to take a look at how rare the bags that they're minting are i think my aha moment though came a day after that when i realized nobody was following the rarity rankings which to me came like a surprise in particular the rarest bags after the first day were things like divine row bags and katana bags which are seemingly

common items they're not things that are rare they're things that are super accessible at just general items and like a tenth of the bags which to me was an initial surprise but i think to me that was the aha moment where i was like okay the community building on top of loot and the things that people do with the bags is a lot more important necessarily than what's inside the bags themselves so i think that was my aha moment so just to re-emphasize that point did you just say that the the whole like divine robes which the divine rooms are the one item in the ecosystem that have the most premium associated with them you're saying that that didn't come out as a result of the specific scarcity of divine robes it was just more a meme that people latched on to it's like oh

we like the divine robes yay divine robes and all of a sudden there's like two tiers in the discord like the divine romans have like a floor price that's like five times higher than the actual floor price and there's no fundamental reason behind that other than just the community kind of just as a shelling point picked divine robes as like the thing that is the most scarce exactly and that's fascinating to watch because it goes entirely against any fundamentals based approach anyone could have done right it's something entirely based on the loot community so guys um let's for the listeners who are still trying to catch up with the loot ecosystem let's actually go through a timeline uh and i actually don't know which of the three panelists might be actually best to talk about the timeline

of the events that unfolded around loot uh does anyone think that they can tell the timeline of loot really really well jackson should has yeah jackson just got volunteered so yeah i'll try my best uh yeah i mean i was i was there you know from minute one basically um i think i have a clear sketch of the first few days and then after that it starts getting really crazy i think that's true for everyone yeah the first you know the first like 30 minutes of it was a relatively small number of people i feel like uh just going on to the smart contract on ether scan and connecting their wallets and renting these bags for free um but after like the first 30 minutes it it it started spreading around on

twitter and i even created like a simple little guide on twitter that people could use to to figure out how to mimic it because so many people aren't familiar with minting nfts on ether scan and so i i shared this twitter thread about how to do it other people started sharing things and it just went crazy and within like a two hour period i think you know all basically all the loot bags had been claimed the gas prices fermenting them started skyrocketing because so many people were trying to get on board um and then of course you know nisha's work with you know the the all the data started like giving people uh new ways to look at it because previously there really wasn't a way to

look at it very much it was just like here's all these bags um but you had a niche's data and you had all these other things suddenly starting people trying to query all the data and figure out like what what is in all these bags and why why are these bags the way they are and so you have people asking questions and sort of digging deeper because dom did not really explain much of anything he just tweeted this thing out and sort of left it up to people to investigate do you think that was by design that was an intentional choice by dom i don't i mean i don't think so i think he uh i think he's very much the kind of person that's he has so much going on he just loves experimenting i genuinely think he just he had this fun idea and i

was like i'll just drop this and you know go about my day um i don't think he planned any of it uh which i i think makes it all the more special um and then you know within several hours all the people that couldn't have minted the the loot started trying to buy them on you know secondary markets and you had little you know sites being built that would uh that would filter for specific items so a friend of mine he he had some divine robes in one of his bags and he liked the concept of getting all the people who have divine robes together in a private discord um and then you saw other people doing the same thing like people who had katanas or dragon skin armor they were like well we want to we want to get

together and bond with our fellow people of the dragon skin and so you saw people doing that and like there's a natural kind of a sense of like the the organizing and the building of this stuff is a game itself because you know in a natural sort of fantasy medieval video game you do have people bonding over certain items and certain things and forming guilds and here we were sort of forming our own guilds based on this stuff um but then like within 24 hours you already had people starting building additional projects on top of it lots of derivative projects people kind of taking dom smart contract because you know it's all open and basically copying the contract and remixing it into all these fun different

ways you know you even had pleaser dow in a within a few days of it releasing sort of a a spin-off that was about that was connected into their dog nft token um so lots of memes and things that started spinning out of it and then uh you know within four or five days the prices of the the tokens were just to an insane level and and then of course adventure gold came out a few days later and and will probably could pick up from there how the madness took off well well real quick though jackson like just backing up so um was this like two weeks ago i just like 14 days i think i mean 14 days ago yeah okay sorry crazy there are two distinct like uh crazy weeks in ethereum over the last couple

years that i remember um the one is uh yam week do you guys remember that we're like everything was just all about yams and this this new kind of like you know uh farming craze uh and then yam had some sort of fiasco and there was like a whole uh you know rush to save the emps the second is loot week because as soon as loot launched there was just this frenzy of activity as you're talking about right and not just price activity but all of these other derivative projects being built on top of it yeah so i i'm curious will if maybe you could uh pick up where jackson left off where this is kind of like i guess the derivatives phase or like the project creation phase of um people

building on top of loot so what happened there uh will yeah so the original idea for adventure gold was that it's an in-game currency for the loot ecosystem people can use it for anything within loot and it's this kind of common layer for translating between all these derivatives um it kind of came about because um i the one of the one of the one of the direct motivations for it was that um some of the derivatives were charging mint prices and eth and it felt kind of a little uh uh some of the derivatives were really great some of the derivatives were a little cash grabby um to say the least um and give some examples of what these derivatives were for people who weren't part of that so the very first

derivative was abstract loot so it would take your on-chain loop data and create an abstract image that's like generative art based on top of loot um there were uh there you could you could uh you could generate a map based on your loot um you could generate um uh you could generate uh there were like characters companions all these things um and adventure gold the original vision was oh this would be a cool way to permission mints because if everyone uses adventure gold it's now this like ecosystem where this whole ecosystem is is gaining utility and it's not these like some some some derivatives were very thoughtful and very very well done

some derivatives were less thoughtful and less well done and if they all used adventure gold wouldn't that be a really cool way to to build up the whole ecosystem um and then as i was talking with builders on top of loot people building um different rpg games people building like magic and style systems i realized with them that adventure gold could be this translation layer where you can use adventure gold to translate it to for example uh loot wars has xp which is a fork of adventure gold the genesis project has mana which is also a fork of adventure gold and adventure gold can be this cross-compatible layer um between all of these different parts of the ecosystem um that was the original vision of

adventure gold and that's what's being carried forward um there was this kind of detour of adventure adventure gold as a governance token that i'm happy to dive into if you'd like but um but yeah the the idea is that it's this in-game currency for the ecosystem that could help strengthen all of these projects building on top of it yeah i think i think one key thing that um if listeners aren't familiar should know is of course you had to have loot to participate in all of these derivatives right and even with adventure gold is that the case well like you you had to actually own loot in order to mint and claim adventure gold is that part of the incentive structure and part of the kind of design

yeah so i also wanted to use adventure gold to set a tone for the loot ecosystem so i just said 10 000 adventure gold for every loot bag i'm not reserving any for myself um i i want this to be something for the community something that the community can use um and it was a complete 100 uh fair launch um and uh this was to try to set the tone for the for the community as we thought about derivatives of how to how to distribute them fairly um because uh there were a variety of approaches taken for derivatives some were like claim it now because if you don't claim it someone else will claim your loot bags item forever um other ones where like loot holders have an unlimited amount of time to claim and you can claim it whenever

you'd like um and i really wanted to set the tone of fair launches um for the community in a way that benefits all loot holders um because i think loot is like uh lute has this tension between scarcity and abundance and loot also has this tension between fomo and short-term thinking and like long-term builders and i wanted to move people towards abundance and move people towards long-term builders and less on the scarcity side less on the on the fomo side because i want to zoom out and talk about try and get your guys's opinions as to the holistic definition of this whole loot thing so not just the loot bags not just the

adventure gold but i wanna and maybe it's more about the concept of loot so in your guys's own words what is it that we are actually talking about because it kind of feels like the way that we can like model out lou is kind of like um like an ant colony or a beehive it's not like an individual bee that is the actual thing that's alive it's the whole entire ecosystem the entity is the the fact that all of these individual moving parts are one seamless cohered ecosystem so when you guys zoom out and we step away from the individual bags and the individual items and the individual forks and the individual air drops what is loot like what is this thing uh

anish let's start with you sure so i mean at the literal level like we've all discussed i think very simply it's a collection of 8 000 unique bags of adventure gear that you are free to use in any way i think the abstract level is a little bit cooler though it's the fact that it's an unfiltered unsensible building block for anything else that you want to build on top whether that's stories games experiences derivatives and it's all put into the hands of the community free for use we've all sort of mentioned that these items are in the contract themselves unlike in a url and i think that's super unique about loot it's the fact that there's no restriction it's directly on ethereum so so long as the network is

alive running uncensorable those same properties apply to loot which makes it a really really good building block for anyone to build on top fork change experiment and do whatever they want with it so it's like a creative playground if you so say will you want to continue the thought what what the hell is this whole loot phenomenon yeah so related to anisha's point of just being a creative playground the the interesting thing is that there's a debate in the loop community over is loot building a game or or are we already all playing the game um and i think that there's this is really interesting because like lou has already developed his own universe of guilds of lore of of of in-game currency and economics and

and uh and and there's already builders building on top of it so um yeah the loot community is has has has kind of become this thing much larger than itself um where like there is this just incredible group of guilds um that have already begun um so i think i think that uh that that that that we're already playing the game personally um that we're not waiting for a game to be built that this this is we're all living it jackson you want to add anything to uh this definition of this loot phenomenon yeah i mean i think there's two sort of like metaphors that i feel like i've been using as i describe it to my friends um you know one of which is it's kind of you know it's kind of for the more technical minded it's kind

of like an api you know you have like it's it's this thing that anyone can plug into and pull from which you know everyone you know if you're a developer like you know the power of a good api and like what it can do so that's really awesome and then the other one is is like similar to this idea of a playground like i think that uh i think loot very much is kind of like legos like legos are these all these different types of little pieces and you can build so many amazing things with them and i think to some degree that's sort of what dom did is he just had a bunch of these little tiny pieces of you know that people could look at you can look at a pile of legos and think of things you could start building out of them i think that's kind of what

it was and i think the longevity and popularity of lego is kind of a good example of like just how like how much stuff can come out of just a bunch of small little building blocks hey ron can we talk about like what you guys are contributing to loot and like like why so i think um many people are perplexed with you know why why people would even have incentive uh to contribute to to loot or build things on top of loot like why not go fork and create your own loot right like the economic designs we've been used to in the past is if you

get a list of items and some massive multiplayer online rpg right it's very much tied to the game and there's a reason they've created generated this list of items like you know diablo 3 list or world of warcraft list of you know scarce items it's to allow people to play the game right and if you went to them and said hey i've got a really great idea um all you have to do is just generate the list of items and put that on ethereum like that would be nonsensical i think to um everything we know about how traditionally these metaverses and gaming experiences form so but all of you have been contributing to loot in in various ways and i guess i want to know

why like what's is is it are there some economics as part of this is this just you know hobby kind of social interest why do you think people are incented to actually build on top of this loop project um why don't we start with you jackson yeah i mean i i think for me like it's i feel like my sort of incentives or interests have kind of evolved as time has gone on from minute one like i was mostly interested in it mostly interesting contributing uh to help people people other people interact with this thing that i thought was special so i loved it i i wanted other people to be able to experience it too this is before there was any idea of of money involved

with it or investing or anything and so like i knew that lots of people didn't know how to get onto ether scan and actually connect within mint from it so my initial contribution was literally just here's how to do that here's a short guide and from there like so many people took that guide and ran with it and did it and i had so many messages from people that were saying this is my first nft this is the first time i'd ever done anything with ethereum like that to me is amazing and so you know one of the reasons like i work at rainbows because i i love being you know while it's wallets are kind of this place where you first get to interact with people on their journey in ethereum and web3 and i love being at that intersection and

helping people with those basics and getting people onboarded so like my my role in i guess the loot ecosystem to some degree i feel like from the get-go has always been making things more accessible understanding it uh promoting it distilling these things down so that more people can access it and even like curating because there's just so many things out there that i've tried to try to pick and choose and find the better things that i believe other people should be paying attention to what gives you the energy to do all that is it community or is it like economic or what that's i mean honestly it i think to some degree i i really love seeing people get excited about the things that i'm excited about too like i

i really love nfts i love ethereum and i believe other people will like them also and so if i can give people the opportunity to make to get into that just as easily as i got into it like it gives me a lot of joy just to see other people getting to experience that too like as soon as i minted lots of those loot bags i started sending them to my friends like i sent many divine robes and other bags to friends that like had never had an nft before like i sent one to a friend and two days later he was able to sell it for like thirty thousand dollars like that was his first nft experience and so like i i didn't know they were gonna be worth that much when i started sharing them around but like it was just fun and i

enjoyed it and it was it was like a game like it was it was very like enjoyable from like a entertainment perspective jackson's gonna have a lot of friends requests after this show jackson's friend um well will how about you so you created this whole adventure gold derivative but but i'm curious maybe for you i i know you you kind of shared some of the story of why you created it but what are the incentives both for for you and why you're involved but but also why do you think this you know so many things have been built around this what's incenting people yeah um so i think i'll start with uh why i made adventure gold i think the way i did with with no honorament or anything like that um is because

the loot community is a really special place and it's a special place of people thinking long term about how to build a really really strong ecosystem um and adventure gold uh i i mean i i i i assumed it would have absolutely no value it would just be a fun kind of doze coin style thing where you just like tip your friends with it and you know like like like trade it around and not not not that that it would that would have no no value and i thought it would just be like oh this is a fun thing for the ecosystem to have um and i think that um the uh like like were there like i i there were no economic incentives at

play because i did not expect adventure gold to have any value whatsoever um i just thought this is a fun group of people working together on a long-term project and it's cool for them to have something that can unify a bunch of these different derivatives together and i think that all the derivatives um it was just people like some of the some of the builders i talked with didn't hold any loot they just really loved the community um and i guess like if you want to boil it down to an economic incentive like sure baleno derivative on top of loot gives you access to a built-in audience but it still only gives you access to a built-in audience of 8 000 uh people maximum um so i think that it's really just like the the the community is very special in the way they collaborate um and

like building something that inspires others is uh is ultimately something very satisfying and that that is that is that it's very rewarding aneesh what do you think the secret's been of lute's success and this uh this wild adoption from the community and these people who are so enthusiastic about building on top of it i think the answer is in the question that you asked it's all in the community itself i think that's been the primary reason that i've been drawn in to help contribute it's just it's super exciting seeing things that you built get built you know get used by other projects get used by other builders to incorporate those things into tools um one of the first things i did was just a quick data repository that i threw out there that you know scraped all of the loot attributes gave some

rankings put some other probabilities and then i continued to do that over the weekend for other derivatives that popped up and a bunch of other projects were built on top of that that you know offered variety of cool things to other people building in the loot community and so it really became like this expansive spider web where even a single small contribution that one person can make has the ripple effect where other people build on top of that in the same way like will mention adventures gold even that single contribution now there's other derivative projects that build on top of that and the web just keeps getting bigger and bigger in the same way put together like the loop project website loot loose and all these other projects and people continue to build on top of it and you know remix it in their own way

i think the coolest thing is that because all of this is public domain work because all of its generally unlicensed or free unrestricted licenses everyone is free to go and continue to build on top of this work to answer your sort of question of like what draws people in though in the community i think it's when you take a look at aaa games the hardest part is getting users to play those games it's the fact that you can build the absolute best game in the world and still people might not play it in contrast with loot you have an existing community of thousands of people that not only hold these nfts but also extension loot and synthetic glute are excited by that concept and now you have users that you can immediately tap into by building on top of that ecosystem and i think that's what draws

in a lot of people the fact that there's already a user base that's ready to play a game that already has the items and all you have to do is tap into that existing community guys we have so much more to cover um but before i i before we get to kind of the next piece of this which is like talking about the future of loot i want to zone in on this question because i feel like this is um the base question we started with actually when we when you we started bank list you know david i started bank lists on this on this quest to understand um the value of cryptosystems right and we've had so many conversations the bankless podcast about related topics um vitalik uh constantly talks about this this concept called credible neutrality right um also

you had a you know famous post uh about legitimacy right legitimacy being the most scarce asset that any crypto network uh can have right and these these concepts are interwoven in this this question of like what actually is money and how would a ground-up decentralized money get built and it seems like the credible neutrality of the issuance the legitimacy that the community puts into it across these various dimensions are key factors of how something becomes a monetary asset and so my question is like you know bitcoiners will talk about uh satoshi you know the the immaculate proof of work no pre-mine um you know ethereans will talk about like the first

ico being ethereum where you know things were relatively pure back then and very hard to replicate those initial conditions here um with loot i almost see a similar thing taking place in that we didn't have a a pre-mine this the the founder didn't necessarily have a uh profit um seeking motive behind this and neither did the community and i'm curious if you think that the i guess the conception of this project is is very important in the future of its story so like a skeptic might come and ask the question like yeah if if if you know fortnite uh went into this or epic or some like blizzard some major game studio just put out a list of items

took up took a profit share push that into the community then they'll absolutely destroy loot because it's blizzard entertainment like and they're a big gaming publisher but like i think the more crypto native approach given everything we've seen the space would probably say no actually and it's because an outside entity does not have the legitimacy and the credible neutrality and the issuance of something like luke did so i guess my question is do you think the factors of the way loot was brought into existence have been key to his its success is this just another chapter in the same crypto story that we've seen anish i'm curious your thoughts on that first i think definitely i think it's the fact

that like most of us have mentioned we went into this with no expectations no profit motives nothing of that sort and built something on top of that and that's something fundamentally different from let's say if blizzard were to come in and build a game where it would be for a profit motive it'd be to serve the shareholders of blizzard whereas here it's more so let's serve the community members let's build something together that all of us would want to play in the future and so it's really that community collaborative aspect of building something which is the unique part and like will mentioned earlier it's like maybe building loot maybe building all these derivative projects is the game itself where we're not building towards a game but everything that we're doing to get

there is the game it's the collaboration between all of us building adventures gold building these derivative projects we're in a game itself and so that's super fascinating to me will jackson do you have anything to add on that thread yeah i think that i think that um the legitimacy of loot um in addition to the way it was launched where it was a it was a it was a open launch on twitter that anyone could get for free and adventure gold being a fair launch and many derivatives being a being a a fair launch um uh i think that in addition to that there's the legitimacy that comes from the experimentation is that i mean we're talking about the derivatives that that that that have gained prominence there's been dozens of derivatives that have not

um and that's because like at the end of the day there is uh the the community decides what to adopt like i don't think adventure gold would have been adopted if i had taken uh owner i don't think it would have um because like the derivatives we hear about are the ones that have been broadly accepted um and the community kind of acts as its own uh it's its own its own its own filter of what they choose and choose not to except um there's stuff that's not even on the loot derivatives website that like got like downloaded so heavily in the discord that like it never went anywhere um so yeah this legitimacy what we see has already been blessed as legitimate because it's what the community really likes um and

that's there's that bottom-up aspect that's very powerful jackson you want to add any color to that i mean i think i think really at a very high level it's just people saw that there were pure motives and how all this stuff happened and there was no like ulterior motive of anything and i think when people see just people doing fun good things out of the bottom of their heart like those kinds of things i think are more likely to catch on in a in a collaborative environment than when some when one person tries to come in and do something that's going to benefit them so like dom has has sort of a track record of just doing things that don't have any kind of weird ulterior motives to them he's just known kind of for that within

the community and um you know i think i think you know there's this element of i don't know if luke would have caught on to the degree if if another random person had released it with no prior credibility or experience but dom had been building and doing things and had a reputation leading up to dropping this experiment so i definitely think that that played a lot a lot into it like if dom had not had the good reputation that he had i don't think it would have gone as far as it has so guys ryan just gave that very like optimistic oh credible neutrality we'll build this thing yay it'll it's gonna work it's totally gonna work i wanna put my devil's advocate hat on and be really

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gemiini.com go bankrupt all right guys we are back with the loot panel and i'm about to put on my skeptics hat because ryan talked about how uh the legitimacy behind these l1 blockchains are emulated in loot uh and i want to throw a flag and say well you can't actually take the legitimacy behind an l1 asset and or l1 blockchain and actually just apply it to some sort of app layer thing right and like if the if loot is this game that we're all playing like it's starting off with these items and then there's going to be this ecosystem built around it like why do we think a nebulous decentralized set of people can actually build this thing in contrast to like some aaa blizzard activision game with like you

know shareholder like responsibilities a bunch of employees a lot of capital a an actual goal that they want to build towards and then like a community of people ready to play their game that they must satisfy like loot has none of those things it doesn't even it doesn't have a player base it has like a builder base it doesn't really have an end goal it has just a bunch of things that people want to contribute to uh and then there's like this community of people who like i'm like like me i can't actually build anything i'm not a coder i can just ape into a loot bag and then wait for the game to be built so that when i'm done with all my bankless stuff i have this fun rpg that i get to go play

who's responsible for building me my game like and and why and why do we even think that this is even remotely feasible like i'm i'm again putting on my devil's advocate hat but like why is why do we even think that like crypto isn't just jumping the jumping the shark right now uh jackson you're you're nodding your head pretty well you want to start yeah sure i mean i definitely think that uh i like you i do share a lot of skepticism about it myself like even as an active participant and a community member i i genuinely don't know where this is gonna go like it might not go anywhere long term um but to some degree uh i'm also not a coder like i am the only like i'm a very non-technical

person and so all i've been able to do is really help spread the word and talk about it but um my in some ways i kind of view loot as as more of a it's kind of like how when you go and back a project on like kickstarter or mirror like you have you have some skin in the game you're not really sure if like the thing is gonna actually turn into anything meaningful or interesting but it's kind of like you see the potential of something being built and maybe it'll get built or not but you want to be involved in that story and owning a loot bag or holding a loot bag gives you a chance to follow along closely with this story be involved in it even from the periphery

of being in like a token gated discord or getting to vote on governance you know proposals um so like i i don't i really honestly do not know if if a a really great game is ever going to come out of this it there might not be one but i think that it it it will be fun to to like i think one of the other elements that makes this fun is the fact that we're really early in this whole nft story like as a as an overarching chapter of ethereum we're still relatively early with nfts so this as a project i think regardless of how it turns out will be a historical project and i think that there's lots of

there's lots of like uh legitimacy to the idea of wanting to be involved in something that could turn out to be something really interesting will do you have any uh thoughts about the skepticis skeptical side of this whole phenomenon yeah david i'd say that you're already playing the loot game i mean we're sitting here talking about loot and we're not talking about one of the many dozens of derivatives um so like we are all kind of in our own ways continuing to build the loop ecosystem and how we talk about it and approach it um but does that make it any meaning meaningfully different than just a ponzi game it's like oh yeah the more people that we can get to talk about loot like the better like it kind of just feels like yeah let's just get all the world

to talk about loot like is that really it's just built on ponzi games sir what i'm talking about so i i would say i would say that building is defined very expensively and it's and and there are lots of people who are working on things that you can do with your loot bags and you can play them in games and that's really cool and there's a governance vote right now about how the treasures should be handled should there be a treasury should we go and fund projects to let you do things with your loot bags so there's you have a loot bag what can you do with it there's also like what can we do around the loop ecosystem and that is that is where i think uh building is much more broadly defined um where loot has now at this point occupied this like

part of the cryptocultural consciousness of this just like incredible decentralized experiment um and like at the end of the day like that's uh that's a that's something that will that will live on and exist parallel to any game that's built um and they they're very symbiotic with each other uh anish any thoughts on the skeptic's take on on this whole thing yeah i think even if you're not a builder in the traditional sense of you know writing the contracts making derivatives building projects everyone that is a part of the loot community is sort of like writing the lore for the story already right it's the fact that the last two

weeks has just been two weeks of an expansive lore of what is to come for luke right it's like we'll look back maybe in a month we'll look back at this and be laughing about you know this is what the first two weeks were like you know this was the bankless podcast and after this all these things came out and all of us really are just participants that are this is an rpg almost right it's like we are the participants in the loot lore building the lore as we go and so yeah in you know two months from now people might forget but that lore is always still there for people to look back at and be like hey this was super fascinating this was super cool to me that's the most exciting part the fact that we're shaping the story as we go david can i answer your question too

i want to have an answer to that question so like why do we why does lu have to build a game in the first place is my answer to that question right well it could be we've well hold on though so we've seen like the institutionalization of bitcoin of eth what would the institutionalization of loot look like well that's just like blizzard activision epic games saying hey you can now import your your loot items into our gaming system maybe luke doesn't even have to build the game maybe it's just this lore and this community and its other game studios seeking crypto legitimacy nft legitimacy and like pulling loot into their ecosystems i have no idea but if i was thinking about the the loot team from

like an organic business development perspective i'd be like let's push this out to all of the gaming studios and figure out how they can start incorporating loot into their games and create like an nft gaming space race there and then loot has the advantage in that it's the most legitimate it's the first this is the fat loot thesis sir are you not familiar i love the vision and there's like we've seen other projects in crypto successfully get to that point but i just think lou is so far away from that in its current form that like even saying that is like if i was like a

bitcoin maxie i'd be like you are just like pushing dreams into these into the minds of just like innocent apers who don't know what they're doing like that that's what a bitcoin maxi would say i think i i actually maybe this this is kind of the next question for for the panelists so would you guys put on your skeptical takes for for a minute here i know we're all bullish on loot as a project right or maybe some of us aren't i'm not sure um but um what about like loot are you still skeptical about like what could still kind of go wrong and derail the project derail the community uh will i'm curious your thoughts i know you mentioned governance earlier is that something that could take us down

um i'd say governance has been the most contentious thing that the community has had to deal with because there's two camps one camp is um it should all be decentralized all fully experimental all ground up the community has already decided what's legitimate and know what's not they can continue to have this informal sense of legitimacy just based on how much of something is minted and who uses it and who builds on top of it then the other camp is well we have this huge opportunity to build a treasury that can like provide like seed funding to tons of projects and allow people to go like quit their jobs and work on loot full time um uh we could we could we could we could convince david to come and join and write lore um we could convince like uh convince builders to like

i've been talking to builders who are at game studios who are talking about um like like working on loot full-time um and i think there's two camps one camp is this should be a fully decentralized experiment there should be no layers of approval there should be no layers of legitimacy i'm sympathetic to that but i think that like the opportunity to build a treasury and build an ecosystem and fund people to actually go do this um full time like does that create some short-term contentious discussions yes do i think that's valuable in the long term absolutely am i in the minority on this i think so um and i think that like governance i don't think would take loot

down but i think that there is a fork in the road right now of is this a fully decentralized experiment or are we gonna take a like i don't know how much 15 million dollar treasury and go fund things with that um that's an open question that the community is still deciding anish what's your take on this uh maybe skeptical what could take loot down make it so it doesn't live up to its potential i think i agree with what will said in terms of governance has sort of been biggest fork in the road thus far um my adverse take to that though is that i think contention is a good thing where it sort of gets everyone talking about the important parts of loot right where it's like these questions are things that were going to come up and

either they came up today or they're going to come up a month down the line or a year down the line and so it's a great thing that we get past them as early as possible and we sort of decide you know this is what we'll do this is what we won't do and i think the good part about the fork in the road is that quite literally if you don't agree you are free to go forklift and you know take the community members and go build from that point onwards as well it's sort of like in lore you can have multiple derivations of the lord depending on who sees what as you know the de facto standard and i think that to me is also a part of expanding the loot universe where if there is disagreement we go build loot in different directions

and at the end of the day it all comes back to this soul you know initial project initial 8 000 bags that were minted and so i think yeah governance will definitely be contentious i don't see that as a bad thing though i see that as exciting jackson your take on this yeah i definitely agree with everything uh they just said i think those are some great points i think the other element to this is i think the the something that i've already started noticing is holding back the ecosystem and potentially could hold it back even more is is the financial component of it i think that there are lots of people that do have large stakes in the ecosystem from a financial standpoint as an investment and there's also you know a lot of speculation around you know

the loot assets themselves and trading on secondary markets and i've noticed even myself as a contributor like as i've said on this podcast like i got into it not from a financial standpoint but like i just loved the concept dove in and shared it with lots of people and i think i even you know as someone who was in like the divine robes group early on i've even found that to some degree it's become it's become like a little uneasy to be like a builder in this space around one of these i guess grail items because there is a sense of like do i have like a bunch of people's bag little literally like bags like financial bags like on my shoulder because like i'm affiliated with this thing

um so i think you know if you know if we're not careful like to your point about blizzard or activision or something coming in and doing a project and they have you know boards board of directors and investors like we kind of have that to some degree here as well like we do have investors and people that have a lot of stake in this so i think you know i think we can't we can't really we can't really assume that the space we're in is totally pure and has amazing like uh you know potential for like there's a lot of things that could go wrong here too and i think if we don't if we don't if we don't keep those at the top of our mind and think actively about how to solve those problems and difficulties we could easily see ourselves you know having the same

struggles that a blizzard might have alright guys this has been such a fantastic panel and thanks so much for coming and spending some of your time as we explore this uh undefined ecosystem so my my last question for you guys is has this whole loot phenomenon this whole loot concept changed your vision of what the future will look like and is the concept of the metaverse at all involved with this um anish let's start with you i think it has i think this has been a good experiment to play around with initial spurs of the metaverse i think the two most important things it's done for me the first has been this concept of asset first development the fact that even before a

game has been developed you can have assets like nfts that represent future items in those games and build a community around that and then take community input to then build a game moving forward so in the case of loot it's we you know released eight dom released 8 000 loot bags into the world and now we're building the game we're building the lore that is used in this game so it's a really great community bootstrapping mechanism which i think more and more projects will continue to adopt as we move towards the metaverse the second thing i think that has been really important for me is the fact that a simple phrase that no one can say no the fact that i'm a big believer you know open source technologies public domain work and in the same way loot really embodies that and i think it'll

become more relevant in nfc projects and general projects in the future where people are free to build on top of these people are free to release derivatives and that's really useful in not only just you know spreading the word whether that's spreading the word about loot or other projects but in building that natural community and building these derivative projects the fact that you can do whatever you want whenever you want however you want so i think yeah those are the two things that i think will be the most relevant and sort of future projects or other things that we see being built on top of loot will how has this whole loot phenomenon changed your uh model of what the future might look like yeah i mean i think that loot took off because it was an open ecosystem that anyone can build on top of and that

makes me very optimistic about the future of the metaverse like we have facebook building out metaworks applications do you think we're going to get a permissionless open ecosystem from a company that doesn't let you export your friends list um probably not um does lu show that the success the metaverse is dependent on these interlocking projects being able to create a whole far greater than uh far far far greater than uh any individual part i think i think that it showed that so i think that the metaverse will be won by the by the open platforms um and i think that loot is a is a indicator in its favor jackson same question to you for you to tie this whole thing off how has luke

changed your version of the future that you have in your head and how is the metaverse relevant to that uh future if it is at all yeah i mean i think i think the whole thing i don't think has changed me that much other than it's made me believe a lot deeper in the idea of public domain and the concept of of making intellectual property of nfts far more open i think that uh dom has you know with many of his projects he has pushed forward the idea of just you know one of the phrases i see him using on twitter a lot is you can do anything you want take it like when people ask him about his projects like he'll literally just say you can do whatever you want and i think that that is like

i i think the the truly successful projects that i think will have long lasting impact are going to be the ones that continue to be more open rather than the ones that choose to be more closed off because at the end of the day that's what makes the difference between web 3 versus web 2 and i think if if we choose not to lean into that i don't think we're going to be able to see as more amazing things happen which is um you know i think i think loot is a challenge to every other nft project out there saying how open can you be and will you dare to do that because i think it is scary to some people who are creating things to make what they're creating open but i think at the end of the day it's probably in most cases the right move

do you dare to be open panelists um this has been a fantastic discussion i think we're going to have to end it there but super excited to do a future bankless panel on loot again in in a few months maybe and see what's going on in the ecosystem so thanks everyone for joining us thanks for having us thanks so much wow super cool new mental model there i think unlocked for me is like the idea of um moving from open source software which we already have to open source assets that's really what loot is very cool of course though irrespective of price none of this has been financial advice it never is on bankless eth is risky d5 is risky crypto

is risky so is loot you could definitely lose what you put in but we are headed west this is the frontier it's not for everyone but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey thanks a lot 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

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