Old-school craze meets new in the latest mash-up in the crazy world of non-fungible tokens (NFTs): a project based on a text-based fantasy role-playing game.
Dan Hoffman, best known as the co-creator of Vine, the video looping app, has created “Loot: (for Adventurers), a text-based NFT side project.
In a mere five days, the project has racked up US$46mln in sales.
Here is the tweet that kicked it all off.
LOOT
- randomized adventurer gear
- no images or stats. intentionally omitted for others to interpret
- no fee, just gas
- 8000 bags total
opensea: https://t.co/qSnRJ1FD0n
etherscan: https://t.co/bF9p0RSHX2
available via contract only. not audited. mint at your own risk pic.twitter.com/uLukzFayUK
— dom (@dhof) August 27, 2021
The Loot community has grown quickly and demand for the Loot NFT has done likewise, pushing the price up to the equivalent of US$28,000 at one point.
In effect, this means if you want to play a 1980s Ceefax-style dungeon-delving text-based adventure game with a bunch of hip entrepreneurial programmers, the entry price is more than twenty thousand quid.
A call to arms, fellow Loot-verse samurais. https://t.co/tCfMX6wTlF
— kinnif (????,????) ???????? (@0xkinnif) September 2, 2021
Hoffman seems to have twigged this drawback and has created a simulacrum of Loot in which anyone who has an Ethereum (cryptocurrency) address can generate a synthetic NFT so they can, in the word of the Coindesk website, play a hypothetical game of Loot.
A call to arms, fellow Loot-verse samurais. https://t.co/tCfMX6wTlF
— kinnif (????,????) ???????? (@0xkinnif) September 2, 2021
Synthetic Loot
- returns a "virtual nft" of loot based on a given wallet
- b/c the wallet is the seed, only one bag per wallet
- because it's not a "real" nft, no minting, transferring, selling, etc
anyone with an ethereum wallet has synthetic loothttps://t.co/K2fx9Zw7qQ
— dom (@dhof) September 1, 2021