Loot, One Year Later: The NFT Hype Is Dead—But ‘Lootverse’ Hope Lives On

It started with a tweet.

Dom Hofmann, well known in tech circles as the creator of video app Vine, had released a free mint for an Ethereum NFT with nothing more than white text on a black background. Loot (for Adventurers) spanned 8,000 tokenized “bags” of fantasy weapons and items; “randomized adventurer gear,” in Hofmann’s words. It minted out within a few hours.

To some, it represented the absurdity of the NFT boom. Who would spend ETH on gas fees—which can spike into the hundreds or thousands of dollars—to mint such a thing? But to others, Loot was a revolutionary step forward: the open-source bones of a bottom-up, community-driven intellectual property, with user-owned games and media that correspond and collectively strengthen each other.

Hype skyrocketed—but it didn’t last. While the average sale price for a Loot NFT soared to over 21 ETH, or about $84,000 at the time, the speculative frenzy soon faded. Prices fell, volume slowed, and the buzz quieted in the weeks that followed its launch. But Loot’s creative spark was real.

A small community of creators continue to use the NFTs as “scaffolding” to inspire an array of games and more. One year after the hysteria, the builders of the “Lootverse” told Decrypt about building in the wake of deflated hype, why they believe it’s the start of a creative revolution, and how “Loot 2” might accelerate it.

‘A paradigm shift’

Hofmann previously co-founded Vine and other tech startups before catching the Web3 bug. He launched the NFT project Blitmap, co-created Nouns, and is now building on-chain games with Sup. But Loot proved to be a singular sensation.

It was an experiment, and he treated it as such. He didn’t charge any money to mint one of the 7,777 publicly available NFTs (the other 223 were reserved for Hofmann), aside from the Ethereum network’s own gas fee—an obligatory transaction fee paid to the network—nor did he attach a creator royalty to secondary sales. Hofmann told Decrypt recently that “it felt wrong” to ask for money or to expect royalties for such a venture.

And the NFTs could only be minted directly from the smart contract itself—code that performs set instructions and powers NFTs and decentralized apps—making it less accessible to casual users and crypto newcomers. That was an intentional level of friction meant to attract experienced users, he said, or those willing to push through barriers.

“Those decisions were intended as a way to reinforce the bottom-up and communal spirit of the project,” Hofmann said.

Loot was kept as simple as possible so that others could build whatever they wanted on top of them. Each NFT contained a simple list of Dungeons & Dragons-esque items—Bronze Ring, for example, or a “Grim Shout” Grave Wand of Skill +1—with no visual component or listed stats. Both were “intentionally omitted for others to interpret,” Hofmann tweeted at launch.

While Loot’s lists had some scratching their heads, many Web3 enthusiasts breathlessly praised its potential as a composable, blockchain-powered baseline for future fantasy games and media. What if Loot’s bags of gear could lead to characters, worlds, and stories that all start from the same seeds and collectively grow in time?

Loot had nobody in charge, no firm to unilaterally make decisions about the IP—in other words, no gatekeepers. It perfectly fit the permissionless crypto vibe; a public good for collaborators to treat as a narrative starting point. “Feel free to use Loot in any way you want,” the website read.

Software engineer Thanakron Tandavas called it “a paradigm shift in NFT space” at launch, exalting its bottom-up design to encourage community-led building. PartyBid creator John Palmer likened its impact to NFT icon CryptoPunks, stating, “There was Before Loot and now there’s After Loot.” Even Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin praised Loot’s open-ended approach.

Web3 creators took the cue. Within days, people were sharing their own artwork around Loot, along with guilds, music, lore, companion animals, and quite a bit more. SyndicateDAO co-founder Will Papper even launched an Adventure Gold (AGLD) currency for the ecosystem and let Loot holders claim 10,000 tokens—worth $77,000 per NFT bag, at peak.

It all helped fuel a brief, but explosive market boom around the NFTs, ultimately yielding about $280 million worth of secondary trading volume to date, per data from CryptoSlam. One NFT bag sold for over $1.4 million worth of ETH last October. Derivatives and knockoffs followed. The Loot revolution appeared to be off to a fast start.

‘Boom and bust’

But the hype didn’t last for long. Prices for Loot on secondary marketplaces fell swiftly as the NFT market itself cooled last fall amid a dip in Ethereum’s value. Demand fell off a cliff, from $221 million in trading volume in September 2021 to under $12 million in October, per data from CryptoSlam—a 95% collapse.

People who spent tens of thousands of dollars on a single Loot NFT struggled to find takers at a fraction of the price. Some speculators hoping for profits on a quick flip were instead wrecked by Loot’s brief moment in the NFT spotlight. Today, the floor price—or cheapest available NFT on a marketplace—for Loot sits at just 0.93 ETH, or under $1,600.

It wasn’t just individual investors, either. Kyle Samani, managing partner of investment firm Multicoin Capital, boasted on Twitter of buying “8 figures of Loot” in September 2021, adding a cheeky “AMA,” or “ask me anything,” to his tweet. It was Multicoin’s first NFT investment, and Samani justified it by saying that Loot was “the first investable crypto-native game.”

Months later, someone asked what came of that investment. Samani admitted that it was “down 95%,” but added, “Being willing to lose 100% of capital at risk is very important to our long-term success.” Multicoin Capital declined to comment for this story.

Ultimately, the rapid boom-and-bust speculation cycle cast a pall on the Loot project. The tangible excitement over the open-source, composable building blocks was largely eclipsed by the outlandish sums that some paid for the NFTs—and how much money some buyers then considered lost when the market for Loot evaporated. 

Hofmann himself never promised anything to NFT buyers. However, given the hype cycle, expectations ran high. Some wondered aloud where all of the Loot-based games were. Creative projects can take considerable time to execute, but that doesn’t comport with the fast-evolving NFT space and impatient investors’ expectations of rapid returns.

“Hype can get to a place where it begins to reinforce itself, and can find itself existing outside of the core concept and actual work being done,” Hofmann told Decrypt, reflecting on the moment. “Timelines and expectations can get warped, and that can cause some noise and friction.”

Some of the people who embraced Loot’s Web3-native promise early on continued to build after the hype faded. However, the perception of Loot as a failed project created challenges in bringing in new collaborators and getting their extensions and projects off the ground.

“Loot became incredibly popular and then incredibly unpopular,” said pseudonymous builder Threepwave, who created Loot dungeon map project Crypts & Caverns and is a developer on Lootverse game, Realms. “Some of my friends were like, ‘What are you doing? You’re crazy. That Loot thing lost me a lot of money.’ It left a bad taste in people’s mouths.”

Pseudonymous Realms founder LordOfAFew cited Loot’s “boom and bust cycle,” and admitted that there are fewer creators entering the space since last year’s launch. Still, he said that many builders just kept plugging away despite the declining NFT prices and dimming spotlight. “That didn’t really faze them at all,” he claimed.

Into the Lootverse

One year later, we’re starting to see significant progress on games and storytelling initiatives born from Loot’s open-ended prompt. Some are built atop the original Ethereum NFTs and interact directly with them, while others are inspired by the premise but use their own NFTs. Creators collectively call it the Lootverse.

“What’s going on inside of Loot is a bunch of builders working together to experiment with the rough edges of what’s possible with the blockchain, and build these composable building blocks that go with each other in a playful way,” explained the pseudonymous Timshel, co-creator of the Loot-based Genesis Project who operates The Loot Foundation website to encourage further building.

Beyond the initial experimental derivatives from various creators, Timshel and fellow builders LootHero and Peter Watts discovered a hidden classification and ratings system within Loot’s smart contract code—data that could help develop more consistent lore around the bags.

That led to Genesis Loot, or bags said to be held by earlier adventurers in the community-driven Loot lore, and a Lore Development Kit that provides guidelines that builders can tap into (if they please). Lootverse NFT project Banners, meanwhile, claims to provide a “society and politics layer for Loot.”

Crypts & Caverns is a key bit of on-chain Lootverse infrastructure that provides dungeon maps for builders to incorporate into games and apps, potentially saving a time-intensive step. “Now you’re pretty far along towards making a decent dungeon-crawling game or exploration game at minimum,” Threepwave told Decrypt.