An interview with NFT project Loot creator Dom Hofmann, who says it still has ~200 developers despite the project's market cap falling from $180M+ to under $6M
taking NFT characters licensed under CC0 and smashing them together like Goku in Fortnite https://www.platformer.news/ ... https://twitter.com/... Casey Newton / @caseynewton : A year after I wrote about @dhof's viral NFT project Loot, I checked back in to see what happened after crypto crashed and the hype cycle died down. The project still has around 200 developers. Here's what they're doing: https://www.platformer.news/ ... Alex Hern / @alexhern : I feel like if we're talking about an entertainment project with a price for entry of $1,500, that should be a massive part of the story https://www.theverge.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
When Dom Hofmann's Loot launched in September 2021, its text-only NFT item lists did $46M in sales in five days and pushed the project's market cap past $180M. Casey Newton's one-year follow-up — built on his original interview with Hofmann — reports the speculative floor has collapsed to under $6M, yet roughly 200 developers are still building on the project.
The distinguishing variable is licensing: Loot's characters are CC0, so anyone can remix them — which Hofmann describes as mashing characters together like Goku in Fortnite. That places Loot on the opposite side of the gamer backlash against NFTs, where the complaint was developers extracting money rather than opening IP.
First-order effects
- The ~200 remaining developers are building without token-price upside, shifting their incentive from speculating on scarcity to making the CC0 character set useful in games and derivatives.
- Holders who paid roughly the $1,500 entry price Alex Hern flags now hold access to what functions as an entertainment project rather than an appreciating asset.
Second-order effects
- CC0 strips out Loot's exclusivity moat: any studio or creator can use the characters commercially, so value migrates to whoever executes the best derivatives rather than to token holders.
- Other post-crash NFT projects face the same fork this interview crystallizes — cling to artificial scarcity and watch communities thin out, or open-license and compete on what gets built.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, surviving NFT projects converge toward open IP commons where the token acts as a funding and coordination mechanism while the creative work itself is free for anyone to extend.
The trend: Post-crash NFT projects are testing whether open CC0 licensing can sustain developer communities once speculative demand evaporates.