The Metacast by Naavik: Crypto Corner #13 - Loot Part 2: Decentralized, Collaborative World Building

[Music] gm their listener and welcome to the 13th episode of the metacast crypto course my name is nicola or nico for short and today i'm joined by tim shell lord of a few and three wave and now i feel kind of awkward having said my full name with a bunch of anons on but anyway today as you might infer we are talking about something which is hardcore web3 um it's one of my favorite subjects in the space and it is loot so um loot burst on to the nft scene exactly 166 days ago as we are recording this on the 9th um on august 27th it was created by dom hoffman and um pretty soon after its launch it's on enormous amount of attention when loot bag holders were rewarded with adventure gold the you know so called gold of the loot verse um that was instantly worth like

50k or something insane per bag uh but since then attention in the mainstream nft space for loot has been slowly subsiding many people that i talk to that don't know what's going on assume that you know loot is a failed project because and i think that everyone abandoned it but the goal of our podcast today is to prove that nothing could be further from the truth um and the loot community is still actually thriving so uh before we dive in maybe quickly um guys give a quick intro about yourself what's your background and um what are you currently working on within the loot verse there's two people on that who already talked um we i've already talked to about loot so maybe they can go first tim oh i know you're calling me to go first hey thanks for having us here uh i love the way you put it loot had an explosion onto the scene lou changed the way people think about this ecosystem lute introduced a whole new concept around on-chain composable world building

that's decentralized and fully permissionless and fully cco and so we're going to get into that a lot today but who am i in real life i am a dad of two kids what else am i i'm a builder i'm a entrepreneur i guess you could call i'm somebody who loves to get involved and help spearhead and steer and breathe life into movements i'm a tech co-founder and actually my company was acquired about a year ago and so i've just gotten to an interesting point where i've been able to pull up and out into way less of an operational role and more of a sort of advisor role board vibe type role which has given me a ton of time and energy to throw myself full on into web3 and so where i'm at today i am a web 3 new builder maybe an old builder but a new web 3 builder who's been full-on nerd snipe by loot who has been or i have been just so excited about what loot means and what loot can become

and just this world we can all build together and yeah it sounds cheesy but the connections that we're making along the way the human connections even with pseudonyms around the world are just outstanding um and completely surprising to me um and so i'm i'm a builder within the loot verse i am an unofficial and de facto community leader for loot uh and i am a tinkerer and a hacker and playing playing around with what we can do to build projects within the loot verse but also build bridges across the loot verse and how can we make loot this sort of decentralized uh permissionless and infinitely expansive but and this is the important part still cohesive universe so that's that's the mission that i've been on is to set up the foundation for loot such that everyone has a sort of solid and shared foundation to go build in infinite directions but within a single universe or maybe like multiple parallel versions of a universe in the same

you know meta universe but but so that loot is not just a bunch of fantasy words on the screen but that loot you know just like star wars is a clear universe or just like the marvel universe is a clear universe loot similarly has a set of foundational physics instead of foundational principles a set of foundational ideas and constructs that we can then all go build in a million different directions whether it's realms whether it's crypts and caverns whether it's loot characters loot explorers the rift i mean all these projects are building what excites me and what gives me energy why i'm here too is the idea of being able to help breathe life into this movement and to help build bridges between people and projects as we world build together so that's more than a quick intro but that's me hello uh and i guess i'll end by saying tim shell uh it's a pseudonym tim shell is a word i picked up from a john steinbeck book called east of eden which is incredible and tim shell is a hebrew word that means thou mayest which i just thought was a perfect metaphor for this ecosystem um so you hear me say that a

lot thou mayest as in everybody can just go build there's no permission necessary you don't have to ask anyone if you can go work at that company or work on that project a lot of this world is just permissionless and open and you know thou mayest go build i love that and i now just realized how tough a position i just put loaf and three wave in by letting tim go first uh yeah yeah that was uh that was great tim feel free to mute me along the way too yeah love go ahead um yeah everything tim said that's uh so i'm i'm deep in that ecosystem and tim tim puts it very well so i'll let him speak about that stuff but i come from a 10 years of building in web 2 um but i'm a all-around engineer and a hacker just fooling around with new technologies been in crypto for crypto long time crypto lurker and

passive investor but six months ago when loot popped it sniped me and i have been building the biblioteca and realms project ever since then basically what we're building is a mmo running on starknet which is a zk roll up and we're actually incorporating three waves um crips and cabins as well so we're working very closely together so yeah that's basically where i am at this point cool good to have you back and if anyone wants to you know hear about starknets and and the advantages of zika rollups they should get in touch with lord yeah i'm sure i'm sure we'll talk more about it yeah represent all right and then and then finally we have three wave throughput first time on the pod super stoked to have you welcome hey thank you for having me um my name is threepwave as mentioned um i think

tim and lord did great overviews of the loot verse and all those things so i'll just talk about myself briefly i'm also a builder at heart i've been writing code since i was like five years old um by day i am a product manager at a big tech company you've probably heard of and by evenings and weekends i am also a father recently uh father of two um and a surfer and i spent a lot of time writing solidity and now cairo uh so my baby in this world in my virtual world is called crips and caverns and the idea that crips and caverns is nine thousand generative on-chain dungeon maps which at its base level sounds not just super nerdy which it is uh but also sounds really small like just little maps for little dungeons is very it doesn't sound like the uh permissionless limitless loot versus we've been describing and so the thing that got me excited and the reason i started there was i thought i saw luke pop on the scene and i've been trying to figure out like what the hell should i build i've been wanting to build something in web3 for a while now and i've never had i had some ideas i have

an art blocks collection that i've been working on but nothing that really stuck out is like the thing i want to devote a substantial portion of time to and when i saw the idea that loot could be almost like an item bag for an rpg or a character i didn't know what it was i just knew there's something special there and so my my hypothesis was if loot is a really simple tiny primitive that is composable as team tim mentioned which means you can take it and plug it into a bunch of different other things to make bigger and better stuff what would the other tiny primitives be in this space that would flesh out this universe whether it's a game or a movie or whatever the heck we are all trying to build together and so i broke down kind of like this idea of people places and things and at the time there were a lot of people thinking about people meaning like what does your avatar your profile pick look like we now have projects like loot explorers that are exploring that et cetera then there were people thinking about things so loot obviously itself was an object and an item and a lot of people were making other types of items in this world there were people making um different uh weapons you could carry

with you et cetera at least when luke launched and so i thought the places area was really interesting where do we go where do we adventure and for me my background is in virtual reality and world building and so that kind of fit nicely with my personal things i've been doing in my day-to-day job for the last 15 or 20 years so that's a long long story to describe what got me excited about building something and to give a slightly longer summary of what crips and caverns is it's a set of maps that live on the blockchain there is no human input other than the algorithm that i uploaded in solidity contract so you um when you minted a map you would go to the site you would hit mint just like a generative art it took a random seed and it spit out a dungeon dungeons have a bunch of different forms there are some that are made up of rooms and some that are almost burrowed out of tunnels and the the powerful thing to me is not that you have these little pixel art renditions of maps that i made um that you know not the most beautiful art in the world but it gets the job done uh it's the underlying data it's that if

you wanted to define a floor plan if you were building a game and you said i want people to be able to hang out here well we're not just going to put people in a black void and let them just sit in space so they need a place to walk around need a place to fly around they need a place to hover around whatever that locomotion model is they need a place and so to me this the starting point of a place is where you can walk and where you cannot walk so that would be a floor and a wall and then i peppered in a couple other things that we call points of interest and doors just to give a little bit of flavor to the um to the maps but it's a really simple data structure it had input from a bunch of people in the loop community including dom and the idea is that any developer can take that and run with it and make take these maps and build 3d worlds on top of them 2d worlds on top of them text-based worlds but this will be just one simple piece like a lego that when you take loot and some of these other things that people are building and combine it in there it starts to build the foundation of a game or a world or universe so that's my intro my project and why

i'm doing what i'm doing i love that um it really seems to me with the people that i talk within the loot verse everyone has their own little niche the thing that they're good at and then they see this whole new community this this whole new universe um on the blockchain and they're like hey i can do this to add value to what's happening there um and any everyone can one find a thing that they can do that adds value and no one can stop them from doing that i really love that as i said before i've in my other conversations so i talk to people within and outside of the loot verse and a lot of people outside of the loot first that are you know very in touch with with what's happening within web3 a lot of them think that you know loot was a failed project and the developers should have done some things different which always always make me chuckle because there are no real loot developers or devs um i i'd like to give our listeners kind of a sense of you know what's happening and and and like like how many people and

how many projects there are currently maybe tim you you can take this one like how do you describe the the magnitude of what we're seeing today within the loot first uh right on i mean i'll start with what you said here uh loot is so unique and so different i guess from any other project that exists at this scale that there is no team there is no road map there's not even really a treasury there's a little bit of treasury from some royalties from open c but there's there was no fundraise loot was free so when loot launched it was freed and didn't raise any money dom when he launched it didn't earn anything from the launch so even like a random cool kittens funny farmers whatever 10k pfp collection usually like charges something and get some money to go fund development forward and then obviously these bigger projects have much bigger organized treasuries and dows and teams and road maps and plans and development cycles loot is so unique and that it has none of that

loot has community loot has inspiration for a community and loot at its core is a foundational building block so loot is a contract it's an nft collection that is a composable contract that everyone can build on top of but loot itself is is incredibly pure in that sense on the flip side what that also means though is that loot has no marketing dude has no media dude has no community manager loot has no budget to put behind spreading the gospel of loot uh everything that's happening is through just sort of public good projects and people like us too uh who are just excited about it you know who haven't been compensated by loot um and who i aren't owners of loot itself though you know we may have bought some loot bags but that's yeah that's a different story uh and so what's interesting about that is that when you look at the at loot itself you don't just look at like the core

loot you look at the loot verse up and around it built around loot and built on top of loot and built to expand lude so when you look at what loot is you have to look at the sum of all the parts and the sum of all the parts are incredible there was at the very beginning of loot there were some of those like copy paste uh quick little cash grab fireworks projects that just sort of like popped up and then disappeared and there were some also really nice projects that were like homages to loot there's one called abstract art that was like some cool art created out of loot uh but it was like a one-time thing and it didn't really last you know it wasn't built as what i call a castle like a castle that built foundation and walls and has a bustling society and you know has a plan and conviction so from the beginning of loot there wasn't much of that but over the past few i guess the past few months some projects from the beginning and some new projects have emerged as what i'm calling castles projects like crips and caverns like realms i like the

project i built genesis project like loot explorers like divine dow and i can list off a bunch more of them but what's unique about these projects is that they have teams they have plans they have visions they have road maps they have budgets to go to go fuel those road maps forward and they're all integrated back to the original loot contract they're all pulling from the original loot contract they're connected canonically to the original sort of loot foundational constructs and that collectively all these projects make up what we call the loot verse so the loot verse the biggest projects today are uh realms slash biblioteca which is lord's world uh genesis project which is the project that i built with treppers and holden two other pseudonyms which is a sort of a card trading distillation game to resurrect the most powerful characters of the loot verse we can maybe come come

back to that later because i'm not usually very good at shilling my own project so maybe i should explain that one later it's there's one called loot swag that's a visualizer and they've got a whole plan with contests and more there's a project called banners that intends to create some more composable additional stories and characters and societal constructs within loot there's uh crips and caverns which we just talked about there's loot explorers which is uh sort of a cartoon vibes but super serious project uh if you go to the website what is the website actually uh i want to say it's loot explorers.quest or something like that uh yeah lead explorers.quest you can see immediately it just gives you good good warm fuzzy feelings but like sort of cartoony visuals but serious builders um and serious plan to go build a game and a world there's a project called hyperloot that's

building serious higher fidelity but still composable cco additions to the loot verse there's divine dow which is a fueling station slash we call like the venice of loot kind of it's like a sort of incubator slash accelerator grant ecosystem to be able to to support builders across this world and i've gotten involved in that as well uh there's a game called the crypt which is a 15 person team in the uk uh just a sort of i think it's actually the first like commercial game or like the first sort of quote traditional company who's building something inside the loot verse they just launched their first version of their game a couple weeks ago successful everybody had a ton of fun but now they're working on the next version of the game there's a project called loot larp that's building physical loot project products like physical loot swords and physical loot katanas and physical loot books that all have nfcs and other stuff inside them that allow them to be playable and connected to the internet which is pretty amazing and then there's just a bunch of other

projects that just continue to kind of pop up and builders pop into the discord and the community and say hey here's what i'm working on can i get help can i get support can i get feedback we do a weekly community call everyone does sort of a show-and-tell does updates on their projects it's almost like a stand-up but a stand-up not just for the loot verse but also kind of a stand-up for the hyperverse of just all these projects that people are working on sort of inspired by loot in loot around loot on top of lude and in the spirit of loot so that's a lot that i just threw out i'll stop there but that would be my answer that question of like where has luke gone lewd has turned into a lewd verse loot is not just an open c collection of 8 000 nfts loot is the baseline for an ecosystem that's being built and a community of extremely dedicated and extremely uh intelligent people working in and around it there's going to be a lot of links in the show notes for all these different projects but uh i plan on putting them in there because uh it's worth checking them out there's some really great stuff

happening there um and almost all of this should be at lootproject.com as well yes almost all the links that i'm just talking about should be on the homepage yes um so this podcast is mainly listened to by people within the games industry that are either you know coming from traditional game space or uh more web three space um what are the kind of games we're seeing being built within the loot verse um and maybe i don't know three points you are you familiar with um any of the games that are being built um and you want to talk about you know how it is to to build stuff on chain instead of you know being able to do it um the traditional way yeah i think lord will be better equipped to talk about that maybe i can just give a supplemental answer to tim's question we'll wait for him to reconnect yep sure go ahead so i think the way that i've been looking at loot over the last i mean oh my gosh it's been less than a year um over since it launched is um in the very beginning as tim mentioned it was kind of like a scramble almost like people were trying to figure out what the hell is loot well excuse me what the heck is loot um what are we building

what do we do with this and you saw as tim mentioned a lot of copycats and so i would call that like the first phase of loot which is like figuring out what it was teams coming together teams falling apart everyone being angry about everything et cetera and the second phase which was maybe the end of last year was the projects that came together started to launch and one of the unique things about loot that we see happen is that a lot of the builders building in loot don't talk to other builders there are people out there building stuff on top of loot today that none of us on this call have ever met that will launch in a month or two and will blow all of our minds because it keeps happening over and over and over again and so there's a bunch of teams out there building in silos kind of doing their own thing and at the beginning of the year what i saw happen is myself loaf tim other people we all started talking to each other we started coming together and now you start to see these projects being interwoven with each other so you don't just have realms you have realms working with crypts and caverns integration talking with other teams about integrating more modules in the future you have the different teams

on loot explorers and generous adventures etc everyone's talking to each other and so i think that it's a little bit unlike any project i've ever worked on because it's not just um it's not just about a centralized team and a centralized roadmap it's actually that anyone can do whatever the heck they want and so you start to see people initially acting in their best interests and then realizing that over time when we come together we can build something bigger and greater and so the phase we're in right now to me is really exciting because we're seeing all these different teams pop up and they're not saying i built this thing give me my share of the pie and i'm gonna leave they're saying like if we think about the crypts uh the crypts game they came online they said here's our game we're really excited about it we tested it i think in the loot town square tim ran through a dungeon live if i recall correctly then they came to me and came to a bunch of other projects and said hey how can we work together and so to me that's something that's really special that's happening when you take this combination of the composability of each of these projects along with most of them typically using a really open licensing model whether it be creative commons zero or other things

like that the the ip is open the code is open source and the projects are all starting to come together and work together and to me that's a really exciting shift in where loot was and part of the narrative of like where is loot headed to me is like now that these great builders are coming together we're going to start to see these projects exponentially improving on each other which is one of the benefits when you start to stack these on-chain nfts and projects together is the experience just expands and expands and expands and grows and that leaves us with a big challenge which tim alluded to earlier which is you now have all these builders building how the hell do you keep this thing feeling like it's all one universe feeling cohesive when i slapped a bunch of names in my contract realms has a bunch of names out there there's a bunch of names all over the place like which are the right names how do they fit together etc and so that to me is the the next challenge for us that we're starting to take on now is how do we actually turn this thing into a experience and a world that people from the outside can look at and it doesn't

just feel like a jumbled bag of legos that someone dumped out on the floor it feels like something really awesome and to use to use tim's metaphor again like a castle assembled from subcastles that looks great and is fun can i build on that um i think what the key is is that loot itself acts as a solid foundation for other people to build castles on top of that's what i'm really excited about that's what i've been spending a ton of time on that if the ground on which people build castles is always shaking or it's fluid or there is no ground at all or what it just it's unclear what's even happening it's really tough to build a cohesive universe and that's a tough metaphor here uh but i guess i would just almost make a call to action if for the few people who are listening to this and also building loot projects right now which is maybe not a huge crossover but if there's even like one or two people who hear this podcast and you're working on something related to loot and you're not in the discord and not talking to us yet

come join there's so much order and structure and uh advice and sort of foundational building blocks that we've all collectively both derived from the contract and also collectively canonized as a community now it's not that you need to go do those things you can go do anything you want you know you can make loot into a sci-fi game you can make it you know whatever you can do anything you want because it's permissionless but if you intend to do something that feels like it's part of the loot verse and you want to weave together with the existing universe that's been built the community is incredibly welcoming and so if you pop in there's just a ton of information and support and advice and other builders who can both help with like technical stuff but also help with just lore and sort of foundational physics and foundational building blocks i've been working on that through what i call the loot foundation if you go to loot dot foundation the website i've been starting to publish some stuff that's like the

the intro on-ramp to the foundational principles of loot it starts with just loot but my intention here is that as more things get canonized like realms like crypts and caverns like genesis adventures like whatever you know the rift whatever comes next that we as a community can build newt foundation up so that it becomes the almost like a canonical the guidebook for the whole loot verse but what it is today is the foundational principles from the original contract things like the character three character classes of hunters and mages and warriors that were hidden inside the contract the orders there's 16 orders hidden in the contract the item rankings it turns out there was a hidden set of item rankings inside the contract so off the bat people i don't think fully realized how rich the loot contract was but the loot contract itself has a rich set of principles and physics built right inside of it so yeah that's my call to action to the one or two people who are like yeah i am building a loot project and this is interesting

jump in there are some really interesting foundational physics and principles and constructs that i think can help you build your project you talked about you know things being canon in loot verse and things were not who decides on these things uh so far nobody uh and that's why i tried to frame loot.foundation as like something that i made it's not like loot made it because loot doesn't have any arms or ears or you know fingers or ability to do anything their loot itself is sort of a non-entity so this is more like tim shell's canon i guess but the way that i'm thinking about this is that i'd like to be able to create a what we've been calling an ldk this is actually an amazing community member named loot hero coin that phrase a lore development kit so that just like an sdk that people can hang apps off of that share some principles and share some like you know just guide rails and you can break the sdk but if you want to use the sdk it

makes things easier and ldk is a set of foundational principles that give people starting points uh i don't wanna say define because again anyone's free to do anything but loot in the contract does have some principles so if somebody wants to say hey i like the idea of loot i'm gonna go build a game where bananas fight apples with swords cool but if you want to make it a loot game i would say like tie it to the original loot contract and in the original loot contract it's not just an idea it is a composable contract that has structure and has a lot of like really defined principles inside of it so maybe my analogy is weird there but it there's just a lot of there's a lot of canon in the contract itself so that was the first point here is like let's surface the the cannon from the contract but then as we as a community start to like discover more or you know feel like there's more cannon that's happening naturally

what i'd like to do is create lore development kits so that someone can say hey i'm going to build off of this ldk and maybe there's five ldks there's an ldk that goes in one branch and there's an ldk that goes another branch and there's an ldk that goes another direction but i think by organizing them and structuring them and surfacing them to builders and creators it allows people to make a more conscious decision to say i'm going to weave myself into the loot verse or i'm going to contradict the existing ldks or the you know contradict the existing canon of the reverse or i'm going to build my own ldk and then my project will be the first app on top of that ldk that's really cool three we haven't really talked about that but what do you think about that yeah i agree with that and i just the the one thing that always gets me is this idea of canon um and who is the person that knights the canon items or who is the person that says these are all canon i think i think a lot of people get hung up on that and i'll offer my counterpoint which is that

um the community decides what is canon tim is a voice in the community he's not the voice of the community i am a voice in the community so is loaf so we're a bunch of other people that are to attend the town squares that talk in the discord other builders and and for me i'm less interested in whether someone tells me that there was a dow vote with 260 loot bags that say crips and caverns is now approved to be a loot project or something like that that's not a future i'm super excited about the future i'm excited about is what's happening now which is that when a project launches they share their idea and the community either gets excited about it or they don't and the builders get excited but they don't and just like when crypto punks launched um no one said that crypto punks would be like the definitive pfp collection that everyone would model their pfp after but it happened because it was a cultural movement that happened and people embraced it and no one said that board api club would be the nft that celebrities collect and it's the way to show off if you're a football player or

a hip-hop artist but it has become that way and so i look at the like what is are the pieces of loot the same way what do the builders adopt and start building is one measure of like what fits in the loop first another measure is as tim mentioned like how closely are you following the contract and there are places you can follow closely places you can't we can have a larger philosophical discussion about that and then the third is just is the community members are the community members adopting these projects are they adopting this law are they excited about it or does everyone say hey guys we got to get rid of this idea it just doesn't work let's come up with something new and so i'm personally less interested in consensus voting or formal processes by which we unite something as canon i'm excited about the way things have come together now which is that you have this kind of groundswell of excitement and that's what's pushing the loop projects in different directions if no one uses a project no one integrates it then maybe it's not the right project or maybe it is the right project a little further out and so that's the way that i've seen this community ebb and flow that for me with i kind of like open source ethos and um kind of background being born almost on

the internet i really like that process and how it's playing out it may break down as we get bigger but at least for the time being it's allowed me as a builder to feel like i can be accepted i can show up i can show my project to the group and everyone gets excited about it and that's one of the best feelings in the world is to feel like you've found a place and a community that accepts you and accepts that idea that you put out into the world can we keep building on this thread i think it's really cool and important um and three this is a conversation that you and i uh have near and dear to hearts because even our like intro to each other was about this general topic the way i'm thinking about this is that the word intentionality comes to mind and that if somebody builds a new loot project even if it's totally unconnected to all the existing loot projects and all the existing loot constructs and it doesn't have any reference points to anything in loot i would still hope that that that builder would say i had intentionality in my project and here's how my project ties back to loot

it might be a completely new interpretation of loot here you guys went up down you know or up left and right but i just went down my my loot project is yeah something that no one's even begun to think about yet and i'm actually going to build an entirely new composable you know ldk for my own contract and i get or no not my own contract but for my own project it's okay i guess if someone wants to build a single node out in the universe and say look nobody is allowed to touch my project or work around my project or compose on top of my project or reference my project but i think the vibe of loot is generally that a project intends to be weaved into a wider set of ecosystems um and so i would hope that we fast forward a year and we'll actually have a set of ldks and i think crips and caverns a cool example you can now work backwards and say okay if somebody wanted to use crypts and caverns in their projects here are the

set of principles you know that are like canonical principles with encrypts and caverns but also here's how that fits into the loot verse so that it's not just crips and caverns period but here's the the thread back to the loot contract and like here's the path that it took and like where the crips and caverns exist and loot or why they exist in loot or how they exist in loot i think bringing that intentionality is helpful because some of the early projects you can just skim down the loot project website if you go to lootproject.com and you click on the resources page for whatever reason we decided to keep all the old projects from the first couple weeks and there's some weird stuff in there that had no intentionality it was just like astrology for loot and banquets for loot and yeah colors for loot and crafts for loot yeah there's also like some nf uh nfsw versions of stuff for loot where it didn't have intentionality back to like why and how it's part of the loot verse it was just like it's a thing it's in fantasy land this

is also fantasy so i don't know if i'm saying that that well but my goal here is to try to help builders sort of paint the picture of like how they weaved into the loot verse and if it takes a whole different path that's totally cool and then maybe other people say cool i want to go on that path too yeah i love that and the best thing you did for me was as you mentioned like we had some introductory calls and you basically said like hey your project is great we understand what you're trying to do like let's figure out how you like let's help you figure out how you fit into the verse because my intention was to be in loot and it was really great to have the people who are living and breathing this loot contract and all the lore every day be able to reach out with me and open with like accept me with open arms and then say like hey i'm going to help you write that thread oh you got stuck here i'm going to help you figure out how to tie that knot how to make your story cohesive how to make it all fit in i think that's something really powerful that doesn't get talked about a lot it happens a lot kind of behind the scenes in direct message threads but i personally found that as something really unique about this community yeah it can be awkward too because

we felt that at the beginning it was like but wait my project's done like now i have to work backwards and i don't have to work backwards but are we cool to work backwards back to loot i think a lot of times lore can be the filler and lore can be the tissue that ties it together and some of the lore can be simply just and we don't know just like humanity we don't know every connective thread between every point a to point b in history we don't know all the history of what happened before the cavemen like we don't know every society that's ever existed in the history of you know humankind and the same thing could be true for the loot verse so i think it's totally fine if some projects say hey our lore includes a dark period where we have we know we're loot we know like that there's some foundational physics of loot because there's a loot contract and there's loot items and there's loot nfts there's this loot yeah you know math behind all the contracts behind all the items but in our lore maybe our lord just has a a hole in it and we don't know part of our lore is the acceptance that we don't know some of the ties and that's totally

fine too hearing you guys speak makes me realize um comparing that to the rest of what i see on you know nft twitter that's the loot verse people are like you know 500 levels deeper than the rest where the others are just talking about price price you guys are talking about you know foundational lower uh tying it back to the og contracts um and seeing how it all fits together really fascinating yeah the word is i think world building it's almost like micro world building and meta world building the micro world building is this incredibly geeky stuff that threep and i are talking about like how the concept of greatness works inside the loot contract and how you know what was the meta timeline that drove the loot verse but then the you know meta world building is that we're all doing this together and we're sort of building a world together you know building this sort of like maybe it's multiple parallel universes inside this you know quote world uh but that's what's so fun about loot most nft projects aren't building a world together they're

like you said you know it's like a single game or it's a pfp project with you know some fun little contests along the way or something uh but lude has collectively sort of nerd-sniped so much of so many of us into this universe to go like build a world together which also comes with challenges because world building alone is hard but world building in a decentralized permissionless and uh unfunded way is insane that was like um it feels like doing it fully decentralized with no one authority makes it you know way harder even um but also allows it to grow way bigger right because um the creativity of a thousand people is always more than what one person can come up with i can at least talk about like what's possible on chain in games and like what's happening i can't speak to like which games are being built right now but i can at least talk to like the challenges that we see and the advantages that we see when we are digging into like the level we are with the type of games we're building yeah i'm very interested in learning um more

about that yeah sure please go ahead okay cool so um when we think about building games on chain if i take a step back and i think about how do i build a traditional game without a blockchain typically what i would do is my architecture would look something like i would set out to say i have these characters they can take these actions i have this place that you can explore i would decide if we're thinking about an adventure game for example an rpg i would make decisions like does my game logic happen on the client or the server and i would make decisions like what can each player see how do they communicate with each other at a network layer level and how do they communicate with each other at uh in-game level and so i'll talk a little bit about how that differs when we think about building a game on chain um there's a lot of benefits to building on chain so if i think about some of the things that you get with the blockchain that i always wished i had when i was building games and worlds there is a ledger a shared ledger that

can contain tokens meaning in-game currency or items that is open and available to all projects and it is truly interoperable meaning i can easily take a item from one project as long as it follows some standard like an erc 721 which is nfts i can send that over to another project i can take a token from realms and i can send that to someone in the board apiac club and they can plug it into their board api clip game and so the the items in and objects in this blockchain world are super composable and super interoperable it's very easy for one contract to even call another so you can actually almost have your game server which is your back end directly call the game server of another project which um from my experience unless you build really custom built apis is really hard to do in the traditional game world and in addition they're because everything works on tokens and tokens typically have monetary value it's very easy to figure out what your economy looks like it's very easy to tie that into a

broader economy which is the ethereum economy or the solana economy et cetera and so you have a lot of interoperable you have a lot of benefits from taking from everything having real world value people can instantly understand how much something is worth they can then share that to someone else and talk about it openly they can calculate it on chain using tools that exist and so those are from my perspective two big advantages to building games on chain things you get almost for free and the third is that with this ledger you have an authoritative um history of where an object was created it can have scarcity built in and you can then track who has traded it back and forth so one of the challenges i always see with um if we think about something like uh roblox or vr chat is that they have to keep track of like who created this object and who did they trade it with and if i say i created this little pizza in roblox and i want there only to be 10 pizzas because it's three-points magical mushroom pizza making only 10 pizzas that can be traded

around the world is actually a really challenging engineering problem and so those things all come more or less for free with the blockchain and for each of those benefits that you get there is an equal and opposite downside to using the blockchain so the blockchain is authoritative it has this long ledger that you can query at any time which means that everything is slow because that ledger is distributed across the entire world and so all the things that you get from that being able to figure out when did this person decide when did this person create it who created it etc means that writing anything to chain waiting for a transaction to happen you have to wait for it to then sync up across all those computers across the world so any transaction you do at least on a layer 1 meaning ethereum is typically going to be very slow uh you can users can wait anywhere between 10 seconds and a minute to get their transaction back um second is that the inter that transaction can be expensive in particular where it applies to games

is storing things as expensive it's actually quite cheap to do calculations to cheap simple calculations and to read things from the blockchain it's when you want to modify storage it starts to cost a lot of money to every single user playing the game and so the reason that applies to the games in the loot verse at least or the way that becomes challenging is if you want to build so one game i'm excited about building is a really simple dungeon crawler i have it specked out i have a prototype working it works on chain but storing state whenever a player or modifying state whenever a player takes an action is incredibly incredibly expensive it can cost between 50 dollars and 200 us dollars to do a simple state modification where you flip a couple bits on and off and for if you imagine a game like ultima online the number of decisions a player is taking in a minute they're probably making you know 50 moves a minute 30 moves a minute you cannot write all that to the chain even on the most sophisticated layer 2 technology etc which i'm sure

lord of a few can expound on and so you run into these challenges where you just can't store all the state you can't keep track of all the player movements you can't say this player moved from tile a to b to c unless you want a one to two minute round trip server storage on blockchain to verify that that happened and then you want them the user to pay every single time they move a square in your game you want them to pay 50 bucks and so those challenges to me are the big ones that we're facing right now and there's a lot of solutions popping up like people moving to layer twos which is something we're going to talk about et cetera but i don't think anyone has actually solved how to make a reasonably fast paced game in a way that is cheap on chain you see the games that are semi successful like if you look at i think the game is called dark forest which is a planetary exploration game they purposely designed the game to be slow you're taking turns that can take minutes or days you're doing actions and you only have a couple actions per day or a couple actions per week and they do that because they want

to be able to store that state on chain because it is slow and expensive and the final thing that i think as a game developer for me is the real nail in the coffin today to making great games is that there is no true random number generation and if you think about how many things in games use random number generation from procedurally generating things to attacking a monster to deciding whether you live or die in a scenario to deciding which card you get when you open a card deck most games rely on some form most modern games rely on some form of random number generation the beauty of the ethereum blockchain for example is that it is a shared virtual computer it exists across a number of computers any user can query the state of that blockchain and the contents of it at any time but what that means is that all users have all knowledge at all times it is impossible to do something secretly which means that any time you want to have let's just say a simple dice roll someone can build what's called a

flashbot they can pay a little bit of extra money to front run the next transaction and guarantee that that dice will always roll at 20 time and time again and from my perspective this is an unsolved problem people have clever solutions there's ways to make it really hard to predict that on chain randomness but i have not seen even with chain link which is a popular solution a way to have a truly um truly random situation that is not predictable because everyone has all knowledge at all times so that to me is kind of a very extensive i was trying to say high levels probably a deeper summary that people want of the challenges and the benefits to making games on chain right now in particular the challenges are it's slow it's expensive and every single thing is public and so those are the things that we are working through as we think about designing the games and those are almost the constraints that we have as we think about probably the next year of games before we get to layer 2 technology which will make

transactions cheaper and faster before we get to layer 3 technology which will make things even cheaper and faster so those are the constraints we're working with today it's really fascinating and also we'll explain and i think this is going to be really useful for a lot of people listening so thanks for that man i just took a bunch of notes three i'm actually uh teaching a cal class later today about composable decentralized world building and i guess just sort of intro to the hyperverse at cal berkeley and i have my slides open for it and i just took a bunch of notes from what you just said so i almost want to invite you to come co-present with me but maybe it'll invite me back to a second one and i'll make you my co-teacher that would be awesome i'd love that there we go yeah um i'm thinking because with all the limitations that you said you have games like um guys unchained or like just general trading card games that you know don't have a massive amount of transactions um where it would make it like it's possible to have a trading card game

that lives entirely on the blockchain um similarly a game like chess would also be something that that works um are you telling me threep that i should not accept uh expect a you know massive multiplayer online rpg um where i can walk around and do cool stuff with my friends um which is entirely unchained think um i think it's possible i think there are people out there who are smarter than me that will make that happen um the the pattern that i've seen thus far and i think if i recall correctly this is what the crypt is doing i don't recall for sure but um a lot of games are starting to use their own game server as a middleman so imagine if instead of every action being written to the chain directly by the user which is what's typically happening in when you mention nft today you personally are saying i sign this transaction from my wallet to this contract i'm interacting directly they're introducing a game server like you would have in a traditional game that game server sets the constraints of

what's possible and the game server might say for example you have you're playing chess you have a knight and your knight can move to these specific locations you would then interact with the game server and the game server will interact with the contract on your behalf and store some almost like a roll up of all the different turns you've taken it doesn't solve the expensive issue i bet game servers can be clever about which transactions they submit which data they submit but it does start to give you some basic random number generation it starts to give you some basic ability to put constraints in place around what the user can do and to give you real-time reactions or real-time a real-time experience i have not seen anyone launch one of those games at the scale at which we're talking about and i have not seen how it works over time so i think it'll be interesting to see a bunch of these games launch i suspect some of them work some won't but i do think that that's the pattern we'll start to see adopted is users submit transactions to a cert a game server game server submits

transactions on chain to enable some of these more fast-paced or more real-time experiences where the players have a lot of agency until those patterns are in place and people figure that out we're probably going to see a lot of things like card games space exploration games maybe the best metaphor is if you um are old enough as i am to remember bbs door games back in the day or the type of games you could play on aol and prodigy when those services first came out the number of interactions and turns you could take were very rudimentary almost like an adventure game where you can say i move up down left right and it maybe you can do that but it returns an answer in 30 seconds i think we'll see that level of fidelity of games from an interaction standpoint and people will dress them up with beautiful graphics and cut scenes and things like that but i suspect at least for the next six months to a year those are the types of interactions you're going to see in online games and i would love for someone to prove me wrong send me a link and make me look like a buffoon because if someone can solve that it's going to make all of our lives easier 100 yeah and i think um

i think it's important to realize that most of the people like games that are currently um you know saying that they're going to be building aaa experiences on the blockchain um should realize that a large part of what they're doing is not happening on chain um and only a subset of what actually constitute constitutes the game is truly on the blockchain usually just the storage of of nfts and assets um but yeah i'm very curious to see where this evolves because i can uh you know there's these quotes of you know the founder of ibm saying that or know that like the ceo of ibm saying that there's only room for five computers in the whole world you know these experts that didn't know or didn't realize the potential of this new technology and i hope uh same will happen with blockchain tech so we can uh you know i can run in my virtual loot world with my friends and my my awesome gear that i got out of my loot bags yeah i think that um in the short term so with any new medium

there's always limitations those limitations when used well create beautiful games and so if you look at um so i'm more familiar with virtual reality so there were a lot of experiences early on where you could do really simple things you couldn't even move your head around you could basically turn left and right with your head you had no hands etc but there were some really fun games that were created during that time or maybe little experiences that really took advantage of those things you do have similar with on mobile if you think about angry birds which was one of the first games to kind of break out on mobile um the game is not that complex it's really simple it's not a real-time first-person shooter like we have now it's just a really simple drag let go and an action happens game and so i do think that there will be um game designers who use the medium incredibly well who work within those constraints i think we're already starting to see very early glimpses of that with some of the staking games that exist with some of the kind of like um arbitrage and ponzi scheme games that are out there and i think that someone will figure out

what are the constraints of this medium how do we take those and take them instead of looking at them as a crutch how do we make how do we look at them as something that is our limitation how do we look at those as something that's a benefit how do we really lean to those challenges and make a great game um i hope it's someone in the loop first but i think a couple people will figure that out in the near term they just might be slower paced games than we're used to i think you hit the nail on the head i fully agree um and one of the cool things is that if someone figures it out even if it's not within the loot verse nothing stopping us from you know taking inspiration and making it happen here as well yeah that's true um i'm looking at the time we we still yeah i can i can throw in like one more question i have a ton extra maybe we need to do a part three as well um i'm some of my conversations people ask me like um when we're talking about loots they're asking me well how can you expect um something to you know be popular if

only 8 000 people can actually be involved um and so my question to you guys is how do you see or how do you plan on getting the loot verse to the masses or the masses to the luthers uh tim maybe you can start this one off sure uh maybe i'll use the word constraints that three just threw out too he's talking about constraints in terms of game development and constraints in terms of manifesting a fun game using the constraints of the blockchain i'll use the word constraints to jump off on this point if loot can become the foundation for this infinitely expansive but yet still sort of constrained and cohesive world that we're going to build together it'll manifest as games but also manifest as media and content and collaborative experiences and collaborative media and the outputs of the loot verse the games that can be played the media that can be experienced whether that's like books

movies content stories lore choose your own adventures collaborative art etc all of that can expand to thousands tens of thousands hundreds of thousands millions of people same way that uh you know game of thrones the star wars uh dune can be sort of constrained foundations for a world but that world can go in infinite multimedia directions loot can also provide the constraints for a world provide the constraints that say hey here's some of the fundamental physics of this world defined by the original contract and divi defined by some of the stuff that just is on chain and is clearly now you know the core sort of foundational principle of loot we can then go build up and out to reach people around the world to reach sort of a new generation of people who are sort of just coming online and coming into their own as builders and as entrepreneurs and as creators and you know creatives and say this is something that you can come build within

and that you're not you're not applying for a job with loot you're not applying to you know go work on star wars so to go go work at hbo and try to build you know another version of game of thrones loot is permissionless and so one of the things that's so exciting to me is that the experience of loot today of course is the builders as this this deep experience of building together but i do think that even in the long run when you get millions of people involved who are just experiencing loot i think we can carry that threat all the way through so that the people who are experiencing loot through the form of like i said movies books games stories websites interactive experiences etc that they also have a tinge of that feeling that they also own loot and that they also are building loot together with us and that that sort of collaborative creation and that collaborative world building doesn't just stop at the door and then we push stuff out the door but that the doors are open and that everybody is sort of

permissionlessly building this world together yeah i think the thing i would add to that is like i don't this is my personal implementation my personal interpretation i don't i don't know if anyone else shares this view but i don't see those loot bags as like the inventory that you're gonna equip on your character and walk into a dungeon and hack and slash some stuff i interpret them a little more as almost like item factories if you look at what tim did with the genesis project the loot bags actually create new items and i think you call them mana tim you can talk more about that but i think that we'll see more and more projects spin up that look at those original loot bags as i like the word use physics defining the physics of the universe and then those bags can then be used to spawn new things i don't know what all those things will be yet but that's the way i look at it and so i think a lot of these different composable pieces will start to see sure like like honestly like i can barely afford a loot bag i have one i have like one loot bag i'm really happy it has a plus one in it but i don't think anyone everyone can walk out and buy one of those off the

street but i do think that we can look at those as a foundational piece that starts to spawn new things over time i think saying you must have a loot bag to play is a non-starter no matter what we have to be appealing to millions of users and billions of users probably that don't trade in the us dollar and we can't be selling you know five thousand ten thousand dollar nfts and expect them all to have one so i think that that constraint to continue using that word will be relaxed i can guarantee that for most these experiences you won't have to own a loot bag in order to play 1 000 let me weave into that you use the word factory like the loot bag as a factory for items i i like that i've been using the word fountain that loot is like a fountain the bag if you have the bag it emits items you can distill items from it and also that bag we can define many other things that's a within the lore the loot bag maybe contains more than just eight items and maybe we just need to discover the other things that are inside of it as we build this world together uh but so i just want to reiterate the

concept of the loot bag as a factory or a fountain that we will be distilling more items from that distillation is happening in the genesis project from which we're distilling this sort of mana like distilling this genus i call it genesis mana from the oldest items in the loot verse and then re creating some of the earliest bags or like the earliest bags carry it but carried by the earliest adventures of the loot verse and then playing a game to resurrect those characters that's one angle the other is what realms is doing in the realms game it's going to be a distillation contract that distills your items from your loot bag into similar items but similar items with a small twist that individual items can be traded and individual items can then be composed with each other and crafted with each other to create other items and so i just want to reiterate and agree plus one plus two plus three to that concept that the loot bag emits a fountain of items and a fountain

of stuff that can be used across the ecosystem and some of that stuff managed to be in free like the the way to engage the loot verse an entry point can easily be free to play but the second thing i want to throw out is that when you think about what the loot bag is because at 3p introduced that question of like what is the loot bag when you think about what the loot bag is when i see loot i see through so much constraint the seeds of an entire world and an entire timeline even just the word loot alone like the word loot alone even though it's four letters carries so much meaning like loot alone means somebody once had this somebody probably lost this somebody else found it and somebody else considers it to be valuable and uh just a shade of treasure or i don't know what the word would be but just a shade of like oh i didn't just find a you know a bag of bananas on the ground i wouldn't call

that loot but like wow i'd pick something up and there's something sparkling here there's something special about this i found a bag of loot what is this and then as you open it up and you look inside and you look at the items inside that loot bag the way that the items work and the way the original contract works suggests story seeds up and down an entire history story seeds that go all the way back to the beginning of time that suggests there was once you know a beginning once a genesis era once a very beginning of this loot verse timeline and then all the way to the future that suggests sort of some hidden lore and some hidden stories yet to be told inside the original contract so i don't want to get like too geeky with that but this is almost like um i don't know opening up like the the bible or something and trying to derive meaning out of it but there's a lot of meaning inside of it including even inside the contract there are hidden stories and hidden words that haven't even manifested into loot bags yet and that even across

you know a million more loot bags still wouldn't be manifested into loot bags but the words are there they're in the contract there's you can see them in plain sight on the blockchain and so even something like that suggests lore to be discovered stories to be discovered so again when i look at the loot bags even though they're simple i see them as a an invitation to go build a world but also the seeds of that world and the seeds and some of the scaffolding and some of the foundational principles that aren't just open-ended to anything but actually are already defined and so my mission has been to both surface those up and out to share them with the world to explain them and to put them in a format that other people can can grok and understand and then go build sort of infinite creative stuff on top of i feel like we could keep jamming on this for hours but uh i'm gonna have to call it now unfortunately so uh tim and threep thanks for joining loaf lord of a few he uh he was on for a

bit but unfortunately australian internet um did him in and um oh yeah okay i just see three wave wants me to tie up um with the final question all right i'll i'll do that um let me just restart just after tim shell finished um that's really cool uh tim thanks thanks for sharing that um as a final question um for this episode because i see it's already you know getting a long one um what is next for loot um i'm curious to know you know what you guys are up to where you see this going um you want to take this yeah i'll share the maybe the builder perspective i think tim has a bunch of things he's working on but um the thing that's on my mind that i see happening almost the broader trend happening with loot right now is a lot of the builders are starting to look to layer two chains to solve a lot of the problems that i mentioned or at least to make it cheaper make it faster to do transactions realms has been taking the lead moving to starknet

they have plotted out a course lord of a few has been pitching this for months um and they are actively building on starknet which is a layer two as you mentioned beginning a zk roller for zk roloff um a lot of us on the builder side are following that journey and so i'm bringing crips and caverns to starknet there's a number of other building builders coming together in the discord to say hey how do we bring our projects over here to reduce the transaction fees to make it faster so we can get to that next million users playing these experiences and so from a builder perspective there's a journey happening the stark net right now not everyone is on the boat moving to start that but a bunch of us are starting to bring our projects over and figure out what that looks like so that as stark that moves into beta we can be there on day one and i'll let tim talk to more what's going on in his end i love that as maybe an end cap i don't know i guess you called on me so i'll make a comment here uh but most importantly is where we're building so maybe disregard some of what i'm going to say the most important is we build together in a way that's sustainable and and i guess most importantly together

but one thing that i would say here that is really exciting about just sort of the broader movement in loot is that loot has gone through this ebb and flow of explosion and excitement to chaos to some silliness to a little bit of a lull to then this building period of just builders building and projects launching and projects succeeding and project scaling and i'd say over the past two months or so we've entered a period of sort of unification again coming back around these principles coming back to the idea that the loot contract does carry a lot of the foundational principles for us to be able to to weave weave into and use as fodder to weave together with all these other projects but i think the next stage for loot is going to be one of coordination and action and maybe like non-consensus

decisiveness and actually just loot itself starting to take action to improve loot itself because that's the one thing that hasn't happened since the beginning of loot loot launched on august 27th and since august 27th the loot contract hasn't been updated there hasn't been another sort of core loot v2 launched there hasn't been a core loot stats contract a core loot distillation contract a core you know loot bridge to stark net you know all those sort of core loot stuff has has all been i don't know in some ways like paralyzed by the permissionlessness of loot so we've gone wild and gone gotten built on top of and around loot yeah i've gone and built a project this genesis project threep has built crips and caverns lord has built realms there's 20 other amazing projects and another 100 projects too that have kind of come and gone but all those projects have been like up and around loot none of those projects

have been loot itself improving again loot itself and so i think there will be a turning point pretty soon where there's starting to be some seeds planted for the community saying like hey we don't have to just work around loot what if we took action actually improved loot itself what if we made a loot too what if we made a loot that has some more of the cannon now weave back inside of it or even just some cleanup of the composable pieces or is teed up for the distillation contract and distillation model in a better way so i think you will start to see some beginnings of the idea of like building building expanding and advancing loot itself which to me is pretty exciting plus there's also some really cool movement right now around the biggest loot holders and just all loot holders being able to tribute bags and participate in the creation of a loot advancement dow that could truly advance loot and the ecosystem with token swaps and grants

and accelerator programs and distribution and just things to take more action to help builders in the loot verse so i'd say over the coming you know month or so you'll probably see some news and some excitement around that and that's that's to me a pretty big change in loot we're gonna have to do it gently and we're gonna have to be careful with it because loot does have sort of a genesecua magic to it but we don't want to upset that but also loot as a community starting to take action uh this feels like you know the time for that and i'm pretty excited to be part of that and help shepherd and steer and you know breathe life into the loot births both outside of loot but also sort of at the heart of it itself that's awesome can't wait to see what happens within this magical universe um all right we're way over time tim threep thank you guys so much for joining um unfortunately you know lord of you dropped with this terrible australian internet

but um lord if you listen to this thank you as well listener thank you so much for listening to this i hope you enjoyed hope you are as inspired as we are by this whole new thing that doesn't even exist for a year not even for what is it eight months um if you're building the loot loot space and you're not yet talking to the rest of the community make sure you do and if you want to build within the loot verse just do it um thou mayest that's it thank you so much for listening this was the metacast and we look forward to speaking to you in the next episode cheers [Music]

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