Discuss the ecological development status of Loot and Rarity after the explosion: Rarity has at least 6 kinds of UI interfaces, and the Loot ecology has stagnated for a time
Author | Richard Lee
Author | Richard Lee
On August 27, the Loot project was born out of nowhere. Industry insiders hailed it as "the paradigm shift of NFT" for its full imagination and scalability. One month after the release of Loot, similar NFT projects were born one after another. They all have the ambition to start with "components" and create a potential "metaverse". Before that, there was Fantom imitation disk Rarity, and later there was the recently popular MekaVerse. But among the many players, Loot and Rarity are still the ones who really started to practice.
Andre Cronje (hereinafter referred to as "AC") created Rarity's original contract on September 5, and Rarity has developed rapidly since then. In addition to AC’s active operation and continuous forwarding on Twitter, community developers have created a variety of convenient interactive interfaces and derivative markets. Up to now, the total number of independent summoner holders of Rarity has reached 170,000.
On the Loot side, although the popularity of Twitter discussions has dropped significantly since September 9, and the decision-making was blocked for a while, the construction of old projects is still advancing. According to Opensea data, Loot’s 24-hour trading volume on October 9 has dropped to $620,000 (175 ETH), a decrease of 99% from the peak value. Loot’s floor price on Opensea has also dropped to 4.95 ETH recently.Coinbase Ventures’ column mentions:"People are interested in Loot not because of what kind of NFT they are, but because of its possibility."
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The concept of Rarity is inspired by "Dungeons and Dragons". Players only need to pay Gas fees to create a total of 11 types of "summoners". They earn XP experience points through adventures every day, and then upgrade, acquire skills and spells, etc. But at the beginning of its creation, Rarity had no front end, just a string of smart contract codes written by AC. The so-called "play" method was to interact under the contract and send receipt information.
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One of the UI interfaces of the Rarity ecosystemTwo days after its release, Rarity had its first front-end interface created by community developers, greatly lowering the barrier to entry for players.
So far, Rarity has at least 6 different UI interfaces, and there are also 2 trading markets, as well as derived maps, simple games, etc.
According to player Damon, the current gameplay of Rarity is very basic, including upgrading, fighting monsters, casting equipment, etc., but "the development speed is very fast, and more and more developers are expanding the game based on their own understanding." A large trading market launched earlier, now has a lot of transaction volume, and developers have begun to earn income.
Summoners with earlier Mint (casting) and higher numbers, "sold tens of thousands of yuan, which is normal," Damon said. For developers, in addition to charging fees, the front-end provides functions such as automatic adventure, and can also earn income.
Damon said that because he has been playing Rarity recently, he has become interested in developing games and is learning contract codes. In Rarity's Discord group, some members said from time to time that "this is a good opportunity to learn Solidity and Web3", "trying to learn the Solidity programming language", etc."This is the first truly community-driven blockchain game. It is also a pleasure for everyone to write games together."
Damon said.
In contrast to Rarity's popularity and playability, there is the Loot community, where project updates have stagnated for a time.
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Source: @lootproject/Twitter
The construction speed of the Loot ecology was once famous for the summary map of derivative projects released by the Twitter account @lootproject on the fifth day of Loot’s birth. At that time, most of the community members developed tool applications such as scarcity viewing and visualization. One month after its release, Loot's derivative projects have been enriched but the development level is still low. In terms of ecological complexity, community member Hill compared the current stage to "paramecia".
The trading market Lootmart and Loot Exchange are two derivative projects launched at the end of September. Among them, Lootmart allows Loot holders to split the Loot package containing 8 kinds of equipment into independent NFTs, and exchange items with other Loot holders, and each item is equipped with an AI-generated image. Loot Exchange is a community trading platform that supports platform-native orders and OpenSea orders, where 1% of the transaction fee is donated to the community treasury.In late September, the update of the Loot ecology stagnated for a while. At that time, most of the active posts in the Loot community forum loot.talk were related to tokens and community governance, rather than new project development.
According to Hill, the Loot community was less popular at the time because community decision-making had stalled.
According to him, the important issues in the Loot community at that time were the destruction of the Loot contract key by Loot founder Dominik Hofmann and the decision on how to deal with the more than 200 "founder Loot" held by Dom. Although the proposal to destroy the Loot contract keys has been passed, it still needs to be executed by Dom himself. And Dom previously said that he is in the honeymoon period and rarely shows up.
The above-mentioned decision-making dilemma has been improved in recent days. Dom himself initiated a proposal on October 3rd to transfer the 200 owner loot bags he held to the community treasury. As of October 11th, the proposal has been successfully passed, and the Loot contract key will follow soon destroy.
After the community governance gained some certainty, the project update of the Loot community also accelerated significantly. According to Hill, Treasure and Genesis Project are the two spin-off projects that have become popular in the Looot community recently. Treasure provides the Yield Farm function, which supports users to mortgage Loot, AGLD, etc. to provide liquidity and obtain income.
The Genesis Project is an "old project" that had a certain degree of enthusiasm when Loot was released. The creative team believes that there are 16 "original" orders hidden in Loot's random distribution rules. Loot holders can start a "restore the original Loot universe" Order, resurrection of the founding adventurer" game, and the game will be developed in a trustless and collaborative manner rather than competition. Some users believe that this game is a good entry point for learning Web3. Currently, the project has been updated to Chapter 3.
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Two states of collaboration: AC dominates Rarity, Loot decentralized development
Rarity's efficient advancement speed is also due to the active operation of AC himself and the Fantom team behind him to a certain extent.
After AC creates the original contract, it will update the core module code of the game such as items and casting equipment (Cafting) in the code base from time to time. On September 13th, AC also announced on its blog that it would offer a bounty of up to US$100,000 to Rarity’s ecological builders. The rewards include expanding Rarity content (name, forest, etc.), UI development, and integrating Rarity into another game. And develop a complete game based on Rarity.
In addition to controlling the core code design of the game, AC himself will also screen the derivative projects created by the community.
Rahim, an active developer of Rarity, introduced to "Chain Catcher" that AC will see if the new project is in line with Rarity's larger vision. If AC "admits" a new project, he will forward the project on Twitter and write it into in his Github. However, new projects that are suspected of "cutting leeks" are not recognized by AC. If some new projects have not yet been launched on the front end, players need to pay to buy items.
In late September, a module project called "RAR" had previously released airdrops to some players, but its receipt had a cap of 21 million. Rahim said that this actually violated Rarity's vision of becoming an "unlimited game world". Dscord history records show that on September 21, AC himself announced in the public channel that any topic related to RAR will be banned or muted.
In fact, apart from the originality of the concept, the difference in the way of collaboration is the important difference between Loot and Rarity.
Loot founder Dom has declared that this is an "experiment" since the project was released, and people can use Loot to do whatever they want. Dom also said in an interview with technology columnist Casey Newton that he will act as "just another builder" (another builder) to find new ways to iterate and expand Loot.
According to the chain catcher's observation, Dom himself will go online from time to time in the Loot Discord community to answer, discuss technical issues, or propose his own solutions.
In the Loot Discord community's spin-off project summary column, the administrator also reminded: "There is no 'official' spin-off - which implies that the original team of Loot is involved. Instead, these are created by the community and operated by the community. "
As far as the types of derivative projects are concerned, the Loot community encourages content other than games such as illustrations, novels, and music, while the Rarity community almost expands around the single type of games. Source: LootTalkIn terms of the impact of collaboration on the future ecology, Hill said,"Rarity's imagination is actually largely limited by AC's own imagination"
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Entry Barriers and Construction Costs——Two Problems of Loot Ecology
Perhaps, Rarity is predictable, and Loot is indeed a bottom-up "experiment" as it claims.
Right now, the entry barrier and the high gas fee of the Ethereum mainnet are two major problems that the Loot community is trying to solve. Even if the floor price of Loot drops to 4.95ETH, its cost will be as high as $18,000, and the total number of Loot in the world is only 8,000.According to Coinbase Ventures,
How to introduce incentives to attract more potential players and developers who do not hold Loot is the core of Loot's ecological development.
Hill is also a member of the Loot community governance token Adventure Gold (AGLD). He and his colleagues in the AGLD community are trying to build an economic model for AGLD so that AGLD can provide economic incentives for the Loot community.
Hill believes that, among many incentives, creating an economic system is a more sustainable choice. He said: "Assuming we have an economic system, then there will be other entrepreneurs thinking, now here is a huge Loot community, and the Loot community is a group of people with income. They will think that there is an opportunity to make money here, then this At that time, even if this person doesn’t have Loot, he might still want to develop a game.”
Currently, Hill and his colleagues' proposal is being refined and has not yet entered the formal decision-making process.
Another problem that bothers Loot developers is the high cost of project deployment due to the Gas fee of the Ethereum mainnet. In this regard, Dom recently put forward the idea of optimistic L2 game settings on Twitter, that is, users who own Loot NFT on the Ethereum mainnet can declare and receive features on L2, interact and save upgrade status on L2, and users can also update the latest status at any time. Bring mainnet and upgrade NFT.
At present, many developers have already developed derivative projects on the Ethereum testnet or Layer2. For example, a team recently released a game called "HelloDungeon" on the Ethereum Kovan test network, and another developer used StarkNet as the deployment network.
But in the long run, in the "Loot Builder" group, developers are trying to formulate a suitable Layer 2 or Ethereum mainnet Gas-free expansion plan.However, even after solving the above two major problems, the Loot community may still face challenges:
High-intensity decentralization also means disorderly collaboration. All community members are waiting to see how to achieve order in chaos.
