LOOT Panel | Jackson Dame, Will Papper, and Anish Agnihotri

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 ecosystem is the uniswap grants program is now accepting applications for grants we have been saying this for a while and we'll say it again dows have money and

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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