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Loot NFT: free-to-mint gibberish worth ~$30K in a single day
Vine co-founder Dom Hofmann launched Loot, an NFT that's just a black square with computer-generated gibberish words. Mintable for only the gas fee (~$50-100), a unit was worth roughly 10 ETH (~$30,000) one day later.
$30K
Value of a Loot NFT one day after free mint · USD
“So it came out, Ben saw the tweet, Ben minted one. And I think today it's worth 10 ETH, which is about $30,000. This is in one day. Oh, well, he paid, he paid, you know, probably under $100 to mint one of these just to just for the processing fee, he paid $50 or whatever, the gas price.”
Story
Hiring a Vine star to build the product
The non-technical founders recruited Duke friend Devin Townsend, an ex-Microsoft engineer who had blown up on Vine to 900 million loops. Being both an engineer and a creator made him the ideal person to build a product so fun that talent would do it for free even while getting paid.
“So he was an engineer at Microsoft after college, left, and spent the next year and a half blowing up on Vine, traveling the world. He ended up with 900 million loops on Vine. So in many ways, he was probably the perfect person in the world to build this product because he really understood what the creators needed and how to build a product that was so fun that talent would do it for free, but they got paid.”