Chapter 13: NFT Lego

Most NFT projects share a similar attitude towards the future use of NFTs. Whether as avatars or in-game items, NFTs are often seen as "finished products," which generate more value as the project expands and continues to provide more benefits to holders.

But what if they are not finished products? In other words, NFTs can also serve as the foundation of a larger ecosystem, a vibrant community coming together to build new projects, stories, and experiences around NFTs. These "NFT building blocks" provide a basis for a broader community to engage in innovation and create value, rather than allowing creators to have complete control over the direction and use of their work.

By allowing holders to come together to build a whole new ecosystem for NFTs, no single holder can determine the value of an NFT. Instead, value is generated by all the projects coming from the community. This is an unprecedented way of developing the future of NFTs, where community members can participate and contribute to the value of their creations.

It all started with eight lines of text.

The Birth of Loot

"Loot" is a creation by Dominik Hoffman, one of the co-founders of Vine, consisting of a limited series of NFTs made up of randomly generated sentences, each representing a specific form of equipment in a role-playing game. Each set of "Loot" contains different items ranging from weapons to armor, with rarity levels varying from common to mythical.

The project launched on the Ethereum blockchain. The NFTs were free, and all participants had to do was pay the Ethereum transaction fee to mint a Loot bag. However, minting Loot NFTs was not the simplest task—there was no website or user interface for users to easily mint NFTs; they had to interact directly with the Loot smart contract.

After the announcement on Twitter, savvy crypto users quickly minted Loot NFTs directly from the smart contract, while newcomers were still pondering. The opportunity to mint NFTs provided by a co-founder of Vine prompted many to self-learn how to interact directly with Ethereum's smart contracts.

The "minting" period soon ended, and the community quickly got busy searching for the rarest Loot bags. Within hours, the community compiled a rarity list for the items in each Loot bag.

Everyone agreed that the Godly Robe was the most coveted item. Although the robe itself was not particularly special, meme culture propelled this item to fame, granting it special status and fetching higher prices. The community began organizing various guilds for different items, such as katanas and crowns, each with dedicated chat rooms for community members to communicate with each other.

Loot Derivatives

Although the Loot project started slowly, the community began to envision a future where these NFTs could serve as building blocks for a new and massive fantasy role-playing game similar to traditional Dungeons & Dragons games. However, achieving this vision required several missing components, such as locations, quests, and enemies to fight. As a result, this sparked a chain reaction in the community to launch Loot derivatives, known as Loot Derivatives.

Loot Derivatives are projects built on the Loot NFTs, aimed at supplementing and filling in the missing parts of the Loot world. One of them is the Adventurer's Gold (AGLD). AGLD is a fungible token that players can use to trade with each other in future fantasy worlds.

Each owner of a Loot NFT can claim 10,000 AGLD. On the day of the announcement, the amount of AGLD that could be claimed per Loot bag was approximately $50,000. Imagine receiving this amount of money just for minting a free NFT!

As of September 2021, there were over 40 Loot derivative projects. The three major projects are Realms, Abstract Loots, and mLoot. Realms is a series of generated maps containing unique areas of the Loot world, while Abstract Loot is animated artwork based on Loot metadata. The third project, mLoot, is an extension of Loot that allows those who missed the original Loot drop to participate more. Other Loot derivatives include extended realms of the Loot world, such as pets, songs, guilds, mounts, and more.

Although the price performance of Loot derivatives has not been as strong as before, the user base for these derivatives remains considerable. Whether they can come together to build a larger Loot universe is something to watch. Some on-chain data analysts have even gone further, creating detailed dashboards that provide deeper insights into prices and the number of holders.

In addition to these derivatives, the simple design of Loot has inspired many other projects to launch forks. The main difference is that these forks are not built on Loot, thus not part of the larger Loot universe. Some of these projects include The Settlements, an on-chain turn-based strategy game reminiscent of Settlers of Catan, competing factions like Bloot, and Rarity, a game developed by Andre Cronje inspired by Loot on the Fantom blockchain.

The Future of NFT Legos

Loot and its successors continually challenge the traditional view of NFTs, in which a fixed world already exists. Instead, these NFTs can be seen as composable parts that can serve as part of a larger domain, like building blocks for creators and innovators to construct.

Historically, creators have used a top-down approach to set the direction of projects through artistic style, roadmaps, and execution. The NFT building blocks disrupt this top-down approach, providing the community with a blank canvas to imagine and build projects together.

This bottom-up approach represents breaking NFTs down into individual parts that can be repurposed for other use cases, free from the constraints of predetermined plans. The potential for content to be built on top of fantasy-themed NFTs is enormous.

So, is this what people have been talking about for years as the "metaverse"? Will NFT building blocks disappear in a few months, or will they pave the way for greater innovations in the future? What lies ahead for NFT building blocks, we shall see.

Project Examples

The Settlements

Inspired by strategy video games like Civilization and Age of Empires, users collect various resources from their settlements to expand their territories and influence. Each settlement has six features, such as government and resources, which can be randomly changed up to five times by rerolling the features.

Rarity

Created by Andre Cronje, the founder of Yearn Finance, Rarity is a role-playing game inspired by Loot and traditional fantasy adventure games like Dungeons & Dragons. Players choose characters from different professions to embark on adventures and complete quests in exchange for experience points, gold, and crafted items. Characters can upgrade their skills as they progress and craft new equipment in the process.

The Colors

The Colors is a collection of over 4,000 images, each filled with its unique hues. These NFTs can be used to create various derivative projects that will use the color metadata to define them. The Spirals is the first derivative project of The Colors, using HEX and RGB attributes to generate unique animated spirals.

Conclusion

NFT building blocks remain an exploration of the unknown, and we do not know where they will lead. What is certain is that we see passionate builders and community members working together to realize this vision. NFTs can be a blank slate, as long as the community comes together to create a project that has limitless potential.

Will the bottom-up NFT development approach disappear in a few months, or will it pave the way for greater innovations in the future? What lies ahead for NFT building blocks, we shall see. Currently, tracking the development of each NFT project is becoming increasingly difficult, and the early stages of project development are the most exciting part.