From NFTs to L2 network Loot Chain, what new story will Loot tell?

What's next for Loot? From NFTs to L2 network, what's the new chapter?

Original: “Loot Chain, which was once a hot topic, is starting up the L2 network Loot Chain. Can it ignite a new boom in Lootverse?”.

Author: Mia, ChainCatcher

Recently, the Loot ecosystem project Adventure Gold DAO announced that it will use the OP Stack to build a Loot Chain, a dedicated Ethereum L2 network for the Loot community, to reduce Gas fees. It is reported that Loot Chain is supported by the Web3 infrastructure provider Caldera and the native token AGLD will be used as a Gas Token. In addition, the project recently announced that crypto market maker DWF Labs has committed to supporting the AGLD ecosystem and plans to purchase millions of dollars worth of AGLD tokens.

Does Adventure Gold DAO’s recent series of major moves suggest that the former dark horse in the NFT field is about to return?

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Why build Loot Chain?

Like many other communities in the Ethereum NFT field, the Loot community has been plagued by high Gas fees on the Ethereum network since its inception. It is known that full-chain games usually require extremely fast speeds and relatively affordable interaction costs to meet the high-frequency interaction needs of games. Therefore, the best solution is to develop dedicated blockchain infrastructure to optimize the operating costs on the chain. The popular OP Stack provides the possibility of building a dedicated 2-layer expansion “Loot Chain” for the Loot ecosystem.

Loot Chain is a Layer2 that supports EVM and is completely managed by the Loot and AGLD communities. It is built by Caldera using the OP Stack and uses Polygon as the data availability layer to significantly reduce the construction, deployment, and operation costs of Loot Chain on the basis of reducing Gas fees. The governance token AGLD will also be used as Gas for Loot Chain. In addition, Loot Chain also has an upgrade function to meet the needs of Loot community developers.

In addition to considering cost and expansion issues, building a single chain is also from a developer-friendly perspective. The team stated that Loot Chain will provide builders with toolkits for building new games and development, as well as greater autonomous space. In addition, low Gas fees will support game developers to run game assets such as Token or NFT on the chain, and even run the entire logic and state of the game on the Loot Chain. Prior to this, the core game projects of the Loot ecosystem, such as Loot Realms, LootMMO, and HyperLoot, have not achieved full-chain form and cannot be considered true “chain games”.

Loot Chain is regarded by the official as “an important step in uniting the Loot community and reviving the Lootverse”, and its launch will solve the challenges of gas fees and autonomy in the ecosystem.

It is worth mentioning that Loot Chain is supported by the Rollup expansion solution project Caldera. Caldera is also one of the recent hot projects. As a leading project of RaaS (Rollup as a Service), Caldera has been favored by Sequoia Capital and Dragonfly Capital. According to Rootdata, Caldera has raised a total of US$9 million in two rounds of financing, led by Sequoia Capital and Dragonfly Capital respectively.

Caldera’s Rollup solution provides Loot Chain with instant confirmation time, supports users to participate in games and trade NFTs immediately and complete transactions in real time. In addition, it provides ultra-low transaction fees for on-chain interaction. At the same time, while ensuring that Loot Chain has high performance at low network costs, it also inherits the security of Ethereum Layer 1. Caldera also provides extensive infrastructure support, including block browsers and indexers, which will make it easier for developers and users to interact with Loot Chain.

Future roadmap of Loot Chain ecosystem

It is necessary to briefly understand the development history of Loot and Adventure Gold (AGLD) DAO first.

Adventure Gold (AGLD) DAO originated from the Loot community and is the first “world” construction community on the blockchain, while the Loot community is also the first attempter of decentralization and community collaboration based on NFT. The world created by the Loot community is Lootverse, and the ultimate goal of AGLD is to build a so-called “autonomous world”.

The Autonomous World (AW) is an autonomous, decentralized digital ecosystem, owned, controlled, and operated by a decentralized network of individuals who interact on the blockchain, rather than by any centralized entity. Autonomous World is the ultimate form of decentralized applications, covering DeFi and all-chain games, and realizes the ultimate form of complex applications in a decentralized manner, ensuring community sovereignty. Users can own property, create and execute contracts, and even form their own governments. In short, users can create their own society, thereby making the autonomous world have all the complexity and richness of the real world.

The launch of Loot Chain seems to be gradually making this “ultimate ideal” a reality.

Although the hype surrounding the “Loot”-style NFTs ended its brief heyday in 2021, the hope for the game and storytelling universe “Lootverse” born out of Loot’s openness remains. According to official sources, AGLD will release multiple NFTs and game demos developed based on the Loot Chain in the near future, and developer toolkits and other supporting products will also be released. These toolkits will provide necessary resources for developers to create and develop in Lootverse, and ecological subsidies for the AGLD community will also be released, further promoting the growth and development of the ecosystem. In addition, AGLD plans to conduct hackathons and ecosystem funding to support various inspirations of the autonomous world (aw).

Can the Loot Chain replicate the success of Axie Infinity’s sidechain, Ronin?

In fact, the concept of NFT-specific chains is not new in the NFT community.

From CryptoKitties, DeFi summer, to the rise of on-chain applications, the market’s demand for throughput continues to increase, while transaction costs also continue to increase and settlement times are greatly extended. Everyone is looking for the ideal solution to solve the blockchain scalability problem, and of course, GameFi is no exception.

As blockchain games require more computing resources, all games will compete for block space. To solve network congestion, project parties have developed application-specific L2 extension layers, with Axie Infinity Ronin being a good example.

Ronin was created specifically for the Axie Infinity community, and its launch solved the high transaction fees and network congestion for Axie Infinity, and Ronin successfully helped Axie Infinity achieve fast and seamless trading in the game (almost instant confirmation). In addition, Ronin also launched a customized wallet solution “Ronin Wallet” to simplify the new user’s guidance process, while the launch of the block explorer improved transparency and data accessibility, to some extent, solving the bottleneck faced by Axie Infinity.

The birth of Ronin Chain provides players with a better on-chain gaming experience, achieving a phenomenon-level increase in gaming users, and after Axie Infinity migrated from the Ethereum network to Ronin, its daily active users (DAU) skyrocketed from 30,000 at the end of April 2021 to over 250,000 at the end of the year. This not only achieved the rise of Axie Infinity, but also created an unprecedented heyday for GameFi in 2021, setting off a wave of GameFi and Play-to-earn.

Looking back, Ronin’s success was not a one-time phenomenon. With the gradual development and improvement of the Ronin chain’s ecology, Ronin has become the core of Axie Infinity. In addition, it has also given birth to its own DEX – Katana, which has influenced new users to try blockchain games. Despite being overshadowed by the 610 million dollar theft incident, Ronin is still trying to launch various new features such as testnets, dApps, and mainnet staking.

Perhaps the success of Ronin Chain has set an example for Loot Chain.

Recently, influenced by positive news, the gas token AGLD of Loot Chain has risen by 39.46% in the past 7 days, and its price has reached a new high since mid-April. Loot Chain uses AGLD as its Gas Token, which is undoubtedly the main reason for this surge.

It is reported that AGLD is an incentive token in the Lootverse ecosystem, which is distributed through a fair airdrop process. Every original Loot holder is eligible to receive 10,000 AGLD for free. According to Dune Analytics, the total supply of AGLD is 80 million, and there are still more than 2.7 million AGLD unclaimed. The current circulating supply is about 77 million, of which about 55% of the circulating supply is held on centralized exchanges, providing sufficient liquidity for trading activities. Based on the widespread distribution and liquidity of AGLD within and outside the Loot community, AGLD has also been selected as the Gas Token for hedging Ethereum gas fees.

In addition, according to official sources, a staking incentive plan for the AGLD community will also be released soon, which may mean that the price of AGLD will usher in a new round of rebound.

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