Loot — An NFT Social Experiment

NFT has given an entirely new meaning to the art industry. Some of its potential is rooted in an old dispute between Mikhail Bakunin and Frederick Engels, dating back to the late 19th century. Artworks reflect the sentiment of any historical period, as the current frustration and despair can usher in the Renaissance of cooperatives with the help of NFT.

From Conflict Comes Chaos And Evolution

Flipping through society’s history, it is apparent the most significant changes always occur after some form of conflict erupts. Whether it is ideological, political, military, or otherwise, change will only happen out of conflict and the ensuing chaos. The dispute between Bakunin and Engels is such an example. Even in the 19th century, the concept of self-governing organizations to replace state and capital was a tangible topic of debate. Unfortunately, it was not possible to achieve that goal, but through technological advancements, things are very different today.

From all of this turmoil and chaos, new ideas and concepts will sprout. Unfortunately, for millennials and Zoomers, the current landscape in the Global South offers very little hope. Technology and play-to-earn blockchain games provides some relief, but it is not the “final form.” The sentiment created from this skewed equilibrium is reflected in the NFT artwork we see today, as there is a much bigger story to these creations.

NFTs Need A Renaissance Era

Similar to traditional art, NFT needs to achieve their Renaissance moment. Despite some dystopian and nihilist NFT projects proving successful — Bored Ape Yacht Club or Cyberpunks are good examples — they fail to offer a long-term tangibility. Salvation for NFTs will come from a very different angle. Through technological advancements, DAOs, decentralized networks, immutable money, and cooperatives, Loot aims to usher in that “next moment” for the NFT industry.

One can argue that Loot — and its derivatives — are a different breed of NFT projects. Rather than going for the tried and tested art-based model, the teams introduce a primitive approach. Moreover, it empowers the community in ways not explored before. Loot is rudimentary information that leaves everything up to the owners’ imagination.

Loot seems to have the potential to become the “New Primitive.” It shows the potential of what NFTs could and perhaps should be. Rather than focus on the monetary aspect, it is essential to trigger excitement, wonder, and big dreams. While Loot may not solve the global pessimism level keeping society in its grip, it plants a seed for cautious optimism in this space.

But, what’s the fact ?

Loot as a social experiment

• 1. Autonomy turns into speculation

Any decentralized product, organization, and economic model needs a soul or a core team first, and later it can expand in a broader sense when it is relatively stable. For example, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Linux all have core developers who have built a solid foundation and an open-source community management paradigm. Loot’s current participants are more speculators than creators and developers. Loot has turned into a speculative tool for its users.

• 2. Randomness restrains possibility

A fun game requires an organic balance of numerical value, randomness, and strategy. While Loot is just text-based with no difference in the value input, but total randomness. This low barrier design mechanism has already triggered a lot of cheap copies.

In addition, Loot sets 8 attributes of each character. Although these attributes seem like they can create a wide range of imagination, and there are a lot of user generated pictures. The overall view actually is restricted. You can only have the attributes that are given to you, The content recorded in Loot is text-only, which means what you have recorded cannot be modified. If you have a hat, then you can only have a hat and can not change into a necklace.

• 3. Lack aesthetic consensus

Loot only represents text and does not create a truly visual picture. As we all know, ETH-based NFT usually requires rarity. And rarity is not only distinguished by artificially text attributes, but also includes aesthetics, emotion and other abstract factors. For example, Crypto Punk players are more inclined to look for avatars that look like themselves, Cool Cats lovers like the cute character. While in contrast, Loot’s rarity seems to lack specialty and aesthetic consensus.

How can StarryNift improve

• 1.Stable Operation before total Openness

Compared with Loot’s completely decentralized form, StarryNift chooses to lay the solid foundation first, establish a standard aesthetic style, ensure the safe and efficient tech implementation, create playable games, offer users diverse play scenes, and apply a sustainable economic model. After these, StarryNift will open up for more possibilities.

The StarryNift team will firstly initiate a gamefi Planet including games like character cultivation, treasure hunting, and battle. After the community reaches to a certain activeness, more scenarios will open. After the establishment of a more stable NFT price discovery mechanism and evaluation system, StarryNift will welcome more users to the metaverse.

• 2. Healthy ecology

Due to the price fluctuations, Loot inevitably has a lot of speculative users. StarryNift strives to build a multi-dimensional space including creation, interaction, gaming, entertainment, trading and so on to enable the users to have the willingness and channels to enjoy. By entitling the NFT with longer-term value and gradually releasing the play to earn scenario of the NFT, users are prevented from quickly selling NFTs in the secondary market. StarryNift will create diverse scenarios such as an online performance of NFT virtual idols, hunting for NFT treasure in the virtual museum, upgrading the NFT cards in the battles, forming a guild to win in the game, gaining economic share through NFT airdrops, etc. All these scenarios can be exciting for the users. And if users want to enjoy more possibilities such as increasing the rarity of the NFT, breeding more rare babies, then they need to burn tokens. Thus StarryNift can achieve a closed loop of virtual asset price increasing in a healthy inflation model.

• 3. Efficient technical standards

StarryNift has deployed multiple public chains to build different products for different ecologies, and provided cross-chain bridges for users to apply. By adopting the ERC-1155 protocol, StarryNift can obtain the latest data efficiently and quickly associate with other data to achieve aggregation. Through the cooperation with BOBA to explore the NFT transfer between Layer 1 and Layer 2, a significant reduction in gas costs can be achieved.

Conclusion

Loot is an interesting social experiment. It has incredible significance in making NFT a huge topic in the mainstream.

For StarryNift, a more promising approach is to use blockchain data to make NFT no longer a static label set or speculation tool like Loot, but to make NFTs full of vivid life and promising future. StarryNift wishes the NFT holders can not only enter the metaverse, but also grow with the metaverse, meeting other NFT believers in a better world.

Written by StarryNift Co-founder Martha Zhang.

Website: https://app.starrynift.art

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