author:

@TianranZhang, @fangtingeth, @_eat_apple_, @0xBrawler

A Song of Ice and Fire on Chain

"The dead never die, they will rise again, even more powerful!"

– A Song of Ice and Fire

In just two years since its birth, Loot has created a blockchain version of A Song of Ice and Fire. In the initial frenzy, nearly 300 derivative projects formed a Lootverse.CommunityThe tide receded, leaving behind a group of core members with real creative enthusiasm, who kept the story alive with extremely low expenses and survived the crises of Luna, FTX, etc. Time has proven that a good story never dies: in the early spring of the full-chain game, dojo rekindled the fire of Loot, and the derivative projects of Lootverse regained vitality, with a significant recovery in the number and quality of creations.

The severe winter has passed, and on the eve of the revival of Lootverse, we will reread this "Eternal Story". This article will cover the following three aspects: the origin of Lootverse; the evolution of Lootverse IP and ecology; and why Lootverse is the best story on the entire chain.

The Origin of the Lootverse

Two years ago today, on August 28, 2021, Lootverse was born. Within ten days, the price of Loot climbed to a maximum of 20e at an astonishing rate. Behind the price was everyone's appreciation of Lootverse's bottom-up, decentralized team, and a series of value propositions such as "txt NFT" instead of rich media NFT.crypto The few lines of white text on a black background are the "prompt" of a complete world system. Everyone finds their own imagination of a "composable world" through those columns of nouns, and it is more than just imagination: Lootverse is completely open in terms of mechanism, and everyone can actually participate in the process of "collaboratively building the world".

Early history: the rise of derivatives projects

The result of a completely open story universe and a freely traded market is an extremely prosperous group of derivative projects. Within three months, nearly 300 derivative projects emerged in Lootverse. Although most of them are speculative works, there are also many original works.

The Genesis Project, initiated by Timshel (who is also the founder of Loot.foundation), is one of the important derivative projects. It reorganizes the original Loot bag and allows the holder to extract Genesis Mana and awaken Genesis Adventurers based on the suffixes of Loot. This card collection and status upgrade game cleverly mobilizes the community, requires collaboration and communication among community members, and also drives everyone to have more creativity and familiarity with the meta timeline of Loot. DivineDAO The timeline of the game was also completed at this time. In this newly developed narrative context, there are 2540 Genesis Adventurers NFTs, and the naming rights are open.

Genesis Adventuer and Hyperloot game screenshots

The openness of naming gave GA the potential for "universal IP", allowing a character to be named Ned Stark or Jon Snow, creating a real character archetype in the Lootverse. Subsequently, the Genesis Scroll story writing competition attracted considerable attention to piece together the Lootverse of A Song of Ice and Fire. Dylan Field, the founder of Figma, was one of the first people to donate to the Genesis Scroll project.

Hyperloot is a spin-off project of Loot, visualized with an artistic eye, contributed by an outstanding Thai team, with an excellent roadmap and product quality, and connected to other Loot ecosystems (such as mloot, Genesis Project, etc.) and CC0 projects like Nouns, Chain Runner and Blitmap. With the release of 3D NFTs in 2023 and its own branch game, Hyperloot is still worth paying attention to. Even Fred Ehrsam, co-founder of Paradigm and Coinbase, has spared no effort to create a depiction of the efforts of the Hyperloot team in the CC0 war, similar to "Marvel Heroes VS Capcom".

Crypts & Caverns is another important Lootverse on-chain infrastructure, created by threepwave in November 2021, providing composable dungeon maps. As a universal map, Crypts & Caverns is not only available within Lootverse, but will also be handed over to CheDAO for management in 2023. For information about CheDAO management, please refer to"Crypts and Caverns: A Sleeping Giant Awakened by CheDAO".

The Crypt is a dungeon exploration game based on Loot, which aims to obtain imprisoned NFT relics. Players need to hold Loot, mLoot or GA to participate in the game. The game has three open chapters. This is the first fully playable on-chain Loot game. After the Playmint team received $4 million in funding, they began to build their own on-chain game.

Expedition rewards in The Crypt

Loot Realms is a series of 8,000 programmatically generated NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) developed by BibliothecaDAO.Token). Realms is one of the core organizations in the Loot ecosystem and has maintained steady productivity, subsequently releasing its own governance token $LORD by staking Realm NFTs. Unlike other games, it chose Starknet as the destination for its game landing. The first game that Realm decided to build was a strategy SLG game called Eternum. More on this will be discussed later, as Realm has proven to be the only pillar of the Lootverse today.

Realm NFT and early Realm: Eternum gameplay footage

Dope Wars is a fully on-chain Loot-style game based on StarkNet, launched by perama in August 2021 and thriving with the contributions of the Cartridge team. Inspired by Drug War and GTA, it incorporates street culture into a GTA-style universe. The game's first playable mode, "Roll Your Own", adapts Drug War to StarkNet.L2As an important Loot derivative project, Dope Wars and Loot Realms started on the Ethereum mainnet on August 31, 2021, and distributed 125,000 $PAPER tokens to NFT holders on September 4. The Cartridge team is currently developing Dojo, the StarkNet on-chain game engine, which will be introduced in the second half of the article.

2022 Grant Program to Drive Community Ecosystem

As of the end of 2022, Lootverse's community ecosystem is still thriving with the contributions of its core creators, with more than 30 community meetings held;Timshel's milestone Loot Deck released in April 2022 Still reverberates through the community and serves as the "North Star" of the Lootverse in a practical sense.

The initial craze has cooled, and in the first 3 months, an estimated 300 Lootverse spin-off projects were created, most of which quickly disappeared. However, about 10% of real projects still exist, and new projects continue to emerge throughout 2022. By mid-2022, there are an estimated 30 or so projects, most of which rely on self-funding or grants.

From 8 lines of white text on a black background to a network of interconnected items that together form an infinitely expansive yet still cohesive sci-fi fantasy universe, these items drive the Lootverse.

On the right is an art product created specifically for GA

Gitcoin has been a steady partner in nurturing the Lootverse through regular funding opportunities. In grant rounds 14 and 15 in June and September 2022, Gitcoin provided over $200,000 in total funding to the Loot ecosystem. Round 14 included support for Monsters of Realms, The Violette of Vitriol project, Genesis Scrolls (which involves creating stories, character backgrounds, and creative content for the Genesis era, with the first Genesis Scrolls round held in June 2022), and The Genesis Scrolls Painted (these projects have a strong Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings feel). In September 2022, Gitcoin's 15th grant round provided $75,000 in funding support to 21 projects expanding the Loot ecosystem. With a total of 1,162 donors contributing a total of $92,000, the total funding exceeded $84,000, providing timely support as broader NFT interest declines.

Lootverse Ecosystem Projects in Gitcoin Round 15

Mask Network has also stepped up its support for Lootverse, backing five key projects. In their first batch of grants in November 2022, grantees like Scroll of Genesis and The Rift each received $10,000 to advance narrative and gaming infrastructure. In the second batch of grants in June 2023, Dojo received $20,000 to further develop its StarkNet game engine, Guildly received $10,000 for NFT guild features, and Banners received $10,000 to move its text RPG to the chain.

Together, Gitcoin and Mask’s strategic grants at critical moments demonstrate their commitment to sustaining the community-driven ecosystem that is Lootverse. These funds helped the project overcome market volatility and continue to build during the depths of crypto winter.

One of the more notable grants was the Genesis Scrolls project, a grant to attract writers to bring the Lootverse to life, which attracted nearly 100 entries totaling about 100,000 words in less than 6 months. A professional editor was then brought in to turn these works into a full Loot book, which is expected to be published soon.

You can also check out this article to see where Loot is one year after its launch.

Loot, One Year Later: The NFT Hype Is Dead—But 'Lootverse' Hope Lives On – Decrypt

Realms – The Ultimate Game Center

If Timshel's Genesis Adventurer and Genesis Scroll are the projects that tie the Lootverse together on a lore level, then Loaf's Realm is uniting the Lootverse through products, specifically a suite of games.

Ahead of the game’s release, on February 21, 2022, Realm revealed the first version of the Realm Atlas (world map) designed to showcase upcoming content, and the reveal was stunning.

The Realm Atlas

This image shows the Atlas (world map) with 16 orders (countries) such as FOX, Power, and Giants, which are generated based on Loot data. It is similar to the intricate political landscape in Game of Thrones. NFT projects such as Realms, Loot, Genesis Adventurers, Crypts, and Caverns correspond to these countries in the Atlas.

C&C in Atlas, each skull represents a C&C plot

Later, Atlas evolved several times, adding features like viewing your main four NFT packs, flying over to your realms, etc. It also provided much-needed solace during the long wait for the development of the main game, Realm: Eternum.

The pre-alpha version of Realm: Eternum was released in January 2023, presenting a holistic experience where players can exchange resources, raise armies, build castles, wage wars, etc. The game is still a little rough in some aspects, but the gameplay is there.

The first version of Realm Eternum

A few days after the pre-alpha release, the Realms team launched a $625,000 funding round from the community. $4,000,000 was pledged within 24 hours, with an astonishing 6.32x oversubscription (5.32x refunded), reflecting the community’s strong confidence in Realms’ growth.

However, under the influence of a series of market crashes and other reasons, it is difficult for most community projects to survive the deepcryptocurrencyThe bear market also became difficult, and by the spring of 2023, only about 5 of the 30 Lootverse projects were still active. Still, spring is coming.

Entering the era of DOJO – Cairo’s on-chain game engine

Directly inBlockchainBuilding games on Realms is a huge challenge, as pioneers like Dark Forest and Realm Eternum discovered. Testing of the first version of Realms: Eternum clearly showed two things. First, there was a need for a dedicated game framework or engine to facilitate game development. Second, there was a need for a simpler game that could enrich the world of Realms and get to market faster. The first requirement confirmed the significance of Dojo, while the second requirement pushed us towards Loot survivor.

Thanks to the Lattice team for creating MUD in early 2022, which finally solved this problem and later introduced the concept of autonomous worlds, it has all been a huge success. Dojo originally started as a Telegram group consisting of members of the realm, cartridge, and briq teams. It was originally created as a fork of MUD v1 on StarkNet in November 2022. With the investment of development resources, Dojo has far exceeded the original concept.

The Dojo engine is a public game engine built by Starknet developers. It is the only verifiable game engine on the market, and verifiability has largely inspired the architecture and tools built for the game engine.

Dojo provides developers with an Entity-Component-System (ECS) architecture and integration tools tailored for Starknet and Cairo development. This open source engine lowers the barrier to creating high-quality on-chain games with true ownership and asset interoperability. By fostering a strong community, Dojo aims to drive innovation beyond what MUD has achieved on the EVM.

Loot Survivor is a text-based adventure game created by Bibliotheca DAO on Starknet. It utilizes the procedural generation elements of Loot and lets players adventure through dangerous realms filled with monsters, traps, and bosses. The goal is to rank high on the leaderboard before your character perishes.

The game cleverly implements the Play2Die economic model, which carries and drops tokens upon character death, compensating early adopters and incentivizing participation. Over 500 on-chain characters have already been created.

Loot Survivor demonstrates creative on-chain game design and community engagement. It is built on StarkNet using Cairo, keeping gas costs low while remaining fully on-chain. Despite the current slow interaction speed, Ethereum improvements like EIP-4844 will enhance StarkNet's performance and reduce the cost of on-chain games.

Level 20 game items in Loot survivor

It's also worth noting that the items and numbers in Loot Survivor match up with the original Loot and GA setups, as the game was designed by Loothero, which brings back memories for hardcore Loot fans who want to look back to the early days of Loot mania after entering the later stages of Loot Survivor. Holy robes, katanas, +1 attributes, 16 orders, you name it.

Rise of Dojo and Loot Survivor: Realms members and Starknet on-chain gaming team are moving full speed ahead

The Chain Games Summit held in Portugal on May 25-26 became a milestone for the Loot and Dojo ecosystem. Of the 50 participants at the summit, 6 were from Realm, 4 from Cartridge, and 2 from briq, accounting for a quarter of the attendees. Three days before the summit, Tarrence's announcement about Dojo attracted widespread attention and recognition in the Starknet and Ethereum communities. Polynya said that the infrastructure created for chain games will open a new paradigm and lead to broader application layer innovation. The demonstration conducted by Dojo on the first day of the summit was also successful and received strong community support. The next day, during the designated game testing period, Loot Survivor debuted from the internal alpha version, which happened to be the only playable game at the time. Although Starknet has poor performance and operations in the game take 3 minutes, the leaderboard system encourages those who are eager to win to climb the leaderboard, and the bounty is constantly updated as people quickly break each other's records, eventually reaching a bounty of 0.1ETH. This mechanism has proven to be successful.

As Dojo became more mature as a technical infrastructure, more and more games started to appear on Dojo. (The first version of Loot Survivor was built directly on StarNet, not on Dojo.) After two hackathons in June and July, pixellaw became a wonderful addition to the Dojo family. It started as a brainstorm at the Komorebi Hacker House in Paris.

Both Dojo and Loot Survivor have become key initiatives in the Loot ecosystem. They highlight the potential of StarkNet in enabling on-chain gaming experiences.

Early games such as Influence, Dope Wars, and Realms demonstrate the potential of Dojo. As the first game engine designed from the ground up for StarkNet, Dojo lays the foundation for the next generation of crypto games. Its open and extensible nature will enable the engine to continue to evolve as StarkNet matures. Dojo represents the realization ofBlockchainA key milestone in the game's promise.

Rebirth of Crypts and Caverns

Crypts and Caverns (C&C), a pioneering procedurally generated map NFT project, has recently been acquired by CheDAO, marking an exciting new era for C&C. C&C has demonstrated its adaptable generative mapping capabilities and has great potential. However, progress has stagnated in recent times. With CheDAO taking over C&C, new momentum and scalability are expected.

CheDAO plans to optimize C&C as a flexible mapping module for developers. Through the partnership, the goal is to promote the adoption of C&C as a standard for random maps in on-chain games. This aims to make C&C widely used by games that require procedural environments.

C&C is ready to realize its huge potential and demonstrate its versatility through integration with various games such as Lootverse, and will continue to focus on community participation in the future. C&C has injected a bright future into promoting community-driven innovation in on-chain games. The progress of integration between game universes will demonstrate the adaptability of C&C's ability to generate mappings.

Crypts & Caverns New Roadmap

Frontinus House: A grant distribution platform

Realms Autonomous World (RAW) aspires to be truly what its name implies: autonomous. However, this autonomy depends on the existence of infrastructure, often referred to as public goods. This understanding gave rise to the concept of Frontinus House, a way to deploy capital and fund projects within RAW and the broader Loot ecosystem.

Frontinus House officially started operations after BIP7 proposal

Frontinus House will launch during a fundraiser phase during which builders will present the most innovative and compelling project ideas that are resonant with the vision, mission, and goals of Loot Realms.

The ultimate goal of Frontinus House is to foster a culture of transparency, accountability, and collaboration in the use of public capital. It also aims to support the development of excellent public infrastructure adapted to the needs of the community. By doing so, RAW aims to achieve its vision of self-governance, promote transparency and cooperation within the Loot ecosystem, and provide the necessary support for community-driven projects and infrastructure development.

Growing Realmpire: List of Realms Grant Projects

With Frontinus House ready to go, the first Realm Grant application is open. The 24 thoughtful proposals received for the recent Loot Realm Genesis Grant demonstrate a resurgence of interest and engagement within the Lootverse ecosystem, marking its recovery from the stagnation of the past year. In the passionate period after the release of Loot, nearly 300 spin-off projects entered the scene, mainly focusing on cultural and creative projects, and together formed the Lootverse. However, by mid-2022, only about 30 projects mainly centered around cultural and creative pursuits have managed to survive the initial enthusiasm.

As another year passes, only 5 of those 30 projects remain active, reflecting a decline in momentum. However, a major shift occurred after the introduction of the Dojo game engine to Starknet. This engine lowered barriers for developers, opening the door for a new wave of projects, particularly in the areas of games and interactive experiences. As a result of this shift, a new wave of energy has emerged, with 24 new proposals now passing Realm Grants. This new wave of projects, mostly related to games, has led to a resurgence in Lootverse activity, bringing the number of current active projects to about 30. From 300 creative projects, to 30 cultural survivors, to only 5 active initiatives, and now back to a diverse 30 projects, it speaks to the dynamic journey of the Lootverse ecosystem.

The renewed energy and shift towards gaming-related projects is closely tied to the rise of the Dojo game engine on Starknet. By providing a powerful and easy-to-use platform for game developers, Dojo has sparked a creative landscape within the Lootverse. This, coupled with the organic momentum of the Lootverse, heralds a welcome spring after the crypto winter.

24 projects in Realm Grant Applications

The resilience that the Lootverse has demonstrated through its ups and downs over the past year has highlighted its deeply rooted nature. With this revived energy and newly strengthened foundations, the Lootverse is ready to move on to the next phase of decentralized world-building, demonstrating the vitality of a collaborative ecosystem built on open infrastructure (Loot).

Recent news confirms the official approval of the BIP-14 proposal. The number of eligible grants has increased from 5 to 10, demonstrating considerable confidence in the Realms community in promoting the ecosystem.

BIP-14: Increase Frontinus House Proposal 1 Grants to 10

Why we are optimistic about Lootverse and Dojo game engines

Lootverse fosters a vibrant ecosystem through composability and interoperability between its core NFT primitives. Projects like Realms, Loot, Genesis Adventurers, and Crypts & Caverns establish reusable building blocks that make collaborative world-building seamless. This modular approach lowers the barriers for developers and creators to participate. By covering shared infrastructure such as maps, items, characters, etc., Lootverse gives unlimited power to imagination.

On a narrative level, Lootverse demonstrates the potential of decentralized storytelling. By designing narratives that inspire creativity, the community builds an intricate world through collective creation. This decentralized model resists integration under a single vision and instead fosters a variety of perspectives. Lootverse demonstrates how blockchain can enable permanent, open stories shaped by collaborative participation.

Complementing the rich world-building assets, Dojo provides a strong technical foundation as a game engine for blockchain capabilities. Dojo's architecture is based on recursive proofs, incremental verification, and compressed state storage, breaking new ground in on-chain games. Combining Cairo's strengths in performance, versatility, and Rust-like capabilities, Dojo establishes a development environment that can unlock gameplay complexity far beyond current limitations.

With strong foundational components at the narrative, economic, and technical levels, the Lootverse and Dojo have tremendous potential. As the interoperability building blocks accumulate and the tools mature, their momentum becomes unstoppable. We are witnessing the birth of a new creative paradigm that will reshape the way collaborative digital worlds are built. When imagination and innovation converge, the possibilities are endless.

The Lootverse and Dojo have already laid the foundation for powering the next generation of community-driven gaming universes. As the spectacular unfolds, it’s clear that this is only just the beginning.

Realm Eternum redeveloped using the dojo engine

The role of Asian developers and why we are optimistic about the Asian community

Lootverse offers a fantasy sandbox reminiscent of popular Asian game themes such as the Three Kingdoms. In China, Three Kingdoms games account for nearly 10% of the gaming market, covering a variety of genres from role-playing games to multiplayer online battle arena games (MOBAs).make moneyIn the game, there are even more than 20% characters from the Three Kingdoms period.

The cultural resonance of the Three Kingdoms culture throughout Asia can be reflected in the global appeal of Lootverse. As Lootverse expands, Asian developers, especially Chinese developers, can replicate the mature formula in the Three Kingdoms game. With strong productivity and successful templates, Asian teams are expected to launch related Lootverse games and are expected to occupy more than 10% of the on-chain game market share, potentially reaching the popularity of blockbuster games like "Honor of Kings".

Their familiarity with the appeal of a broad story-based gaming universe will be invaluable. Seeing the thriving ecosystem in Asia, global creators will be drawn to participate in the Lootverse. Their collaborative contributions in technology, content, and operations will complement each other to restore the original decentralized spirit of the Lootverse.

Screenshot of Loaf's Starknet Astro Workshop in Chengdu. The event once attracted 100 people.

With its narrative resonance and composable building blocks, Lootverse could be the next breakthrough gaming paradigm driven by the Asian developer community. Their expertise plays a vital role in guiding Lootverse towards true decentralization and diversity. By connecting global creators, the Asian team brings us closer to collaborative narratives at the scale of the metaverse.

The article comes from the Internet:Starknet engine reshapes Lootverse and opens a new chapter for full-chain games