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Loot takes memes to the extreme

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Will you mint your own NFT?

Loot has spread in the encryption community at a viral speed, and the new paradigm initiated and constructed by the community has opened up people's unlimited imagination. With the support of V God’s retweeted comments, the price of meme codes based on black background and white characters soared to a high point. At the time of writing, the floor price of Loot (for Adventurers) has reached an astonishing 19 ETH. Behind this amazing price , meme economy market logic plays an important role.

Today, Loot-related imitation disks appear frequently. You will find that the forms of participating in the primary market have undergone earth-shaking changes. In the past, you only need to go to a platform similar to Opensea to buy NFT directly, but now participants need to mint tokens themselves in the block browser. Before waiting for your Loot tokens to enter your wallet, you will start to imagine what equipment your character has. When you open Opensea and see your properties, a true image of your mission is already in your mind. I have to say that Loot has really played memes to the extreme, and this extreme is the extreme of meme imagination.

Rhythm BlockBeats at The article "Those "Worthless" Things, Memes Are All Its" analyzes memes or is one of the intrinsic values. And this "The Meme Economy" from 1729 analyzes the development of the meme economy as a whole and predicts its future. Rhythm BlockBeats translated this article:

Meme Economy

Using cryptocurrencies to quantify cultural value creation

Dank Bank is a meme stock market and Harry Jones (Harry Jones) is the "meme czar" in it.

If you are a senior Internet user, then you may have heard of the term "meme stock", maybe Also heard about diamond hands, tendies, apes and /r/wallstreetbets. You might even see teens on TikTok peddling SafeMoon tokens and hotel disposable soaps posing as investment advisors. All of these conceptual terms are a microcosm of the meme economy.

In the meme economy, the market performance of stocks or cryptocurrencies is not so much used to predict business income as It is used to measure the "memeability" of trading assets. This investment strategy created by users and used for mass diffusion can be fully explained by René Girard’s theory of desire mimicry. René believes that "human desires are not just individual behavior, but the result of collective action. We will influence our choices based on other people's ideas." And when the things in these options (such as stocks or NFTs) are scarce enough, they will become more and more valuable.

This desire to imitate leads to massive investment by people who only know who is involved in a certain investment frenzy , and nothing else about it. Friends around and major influencers use social proof to create a community effect that, when combined with a solid value proposition, can even control entire financial markets.

In his article "Understanding the Meme Economy," Gennaro states that "investment in the traditional Unlike traditional media (whether television, radio, or online publications), which follow the path of traditional media (whether television, radio, or online publications) in a top-down manner, meme investing is an outgrowth of a "user-generated" investment strategy , and people tend to use Reddit and Twitter to exchange information."

To understand how this practice works in the real world Just look at the GameStop phenomenon and the Dogecoin phenomenon driven by the Reddit subreddit /r/wallstreetbets for examples. With Wall Street Bets, Reddit users have launched a purely political movement from the complacency of the original gambler-invested subculture. People in this movement believe that government corruption, lack of transparency, and institutionalized market manipulation all contribute to their inherent distrust of centralized financial markets.

/r/wallstreetbets users see meme investing craze as a chance to grab power. Many of the popular posts on the subreddit are inflammatory political statements in the form of memes, petitions and literal class-action lawsuits, and it has quickly become one of the most cohesive political movements on the internet. If institutions, governments, or billionaires can manipulate market prices for their own benefit, completely decoupling them from intrinsic value, what is wrong with us ordinary people banding together to manipulate markets?

Fred Wilson (Fred Wilson) mentioned in the article "Meme Investing", "Memes are not only Interesting and unites us. The meme buzz is here to stay, making meme investing no different than any other type of speculation. I will stop ignoring or even dismissing meme investing and try to do better Understand this behavior. In my opinion, memes are here to stay and will probably evolve to become more interesting.”

While the Gamestop and Dogecoin phenomena have pointed the way, the final stage Fred Wilson hints at is that people Being able to unconsciously invest in the meme itself.

Meme Market Introduction

Meme Economy The concept of /r/wallstreetbets was born before GameStop. The market for real memes online was thriving long before Reddit users came up with the idea of meme-driven investing in stocks, but it's not really a market in the usual sense — it's a "baseball fantasy" A version of a meme market where no money is exchanged.

The definition given by the Know Your Meme official website is instructive: "The meme economy is an ironic concept and Internet subculture, where people talk about memes in financial terms, as if they fluctuate in value like commodities or capital-based assets.”

The r/MemeEconomy subreddit now has 1.4 million followers, and these people call themselves "meme analysts," each dedicated to discovering and "investing" in what they think has the most potential meme.

According to the "Top Investors" ranking released by "Forbes", these meme "investors" are among the most It's very competitive. For newcomers to meme investing, there is a very detailed guide to help them enter the field of investing. For example, "The Beginner's Guide to Meme Economics and Meme Investing" offers the following advice for novices to meme investing:

“Be wary of relying too much on the community to pick all the profitable memes for you. Do your own research and pick the right ones yourself from time to time so you can improve your self-selection of memes. Not only that, but you might become To be the first to spot the next meme trend is to be on the cusp of this trend from the very beginning, and you will feel a sense of accomplishment."

Meme marketplaces like NASDANQ and MemeTrades even offer the earliest internet meme online stock brokerage platforms, "equipped with basic features such as buying, selling memes, setting companies, etc.”

"Meme Insider" (Meme Insider) is a meme professional magazine, and "Forbes" Like a financial news magazine like this, the magazine offers insights and relevant advice on trading in the meme market.”

But if there is no monetary transaction involved, these platforms are just gimmicks (despite their popularity). Memes have no real monetary value until...

NFT

NFTs open the door to digital collectibles like never before. I don't want to spend too much time extolling the virtues of NFTs, as Linda Xie's "A Beginner's Guide to NFTs" and "A Skeptic's Introduction to Crypto Art and NFTs for Digital Artists and Designers" have already been published. An excellent introduction to the industry. The NFT industry will generate $2.5 billion in revenue in the first half of 2021 alone.

Some successful NFT projects, such as NBA Top Shot, PUNKS comics and countless encrypted art platforms, have been successfully copied and Greatly improved upon real-life collectibles such as basketball trading cards, comic books, and physical art pieces. When their value is presented in the concept of NFT, it is not difficult to understand, because each of them has a corresponding practical equivalent to match it.

However, recently the NFTization of digital native content has begun to rise. Digital native content refers to those that have never had physical counterparts content, such as memes and trending videos.

The meme economy is fast becoming a reality, and the creators of some of the most iconic memes on the Internet are These NFTs were auctioned off for hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars: Doge sold for $4 million, Disaster Girl sold for $570,000, and Nyan Cat also sold $515,000 came out, and the list goes on.

The most valuable collections are always those with cultural significance, and on the Internet, there is nothing like Memes are more culturally relevant. Whether you love them or hate them, NFT memes get a lot of media attention, and here are just a few examples:

"Connection": NFT is making those old Internet memes more and more valuable.

The Guardian: NFTs and me: Meet the people trying to sell memes to millions.

Deciphered: The classic internet meme is being reborn as an NFT.

BBC: Harambe: Five years after gorilla was shot, photo of gorilla to be sold as NFT.

New York Times: 'Disaster Girl' Meme NFT Sells for $500,000

Mashable: Classic Meme Sold as NFT .

Every large-scale meme auction points to the same fact: there has never been a medium as good as meme Because it reflects and affects civic consciousness in this way. Memes as an art form have revolutionized the way we communicate. According to Rosanna Guadagno, a researcher at Stanford University's Pace Innovation Lab, memes are "a reflection of our culture."

The creators of the meme selling NFTs are not a bunch of greedy uber-capitalists and don’t want to dupe those in the dark buyers in. They are just ordinary people who, against their will, become cultural symbols (and sometimes laughing stock) known to the world. They have not been paid any money until now they are finally getting what they deserve.

Players get next to nothing from the sale of sports cards and NBA Top Shots because the collectibles have The value depends entirely on the player's own ability. Unlike this, the meme creator is the direct beneficiary.

"Disaster Girl" features Zoë Roth, whose meme went viral It was when she was in elementary school, and since then she has felt very powerless about it, because every time any "disaster" happens in society, her meme will enter the public eye again. Therefore, this auction is "a turning point for her, a way to control this situation that she has been powerless to change since elementary school." Years later, she "can finally have her say on this meme" and even "feels like a new life". After "Disaster Girl" was auctioned off for $500,000, Zoe used the money to pay her student loans and donated most of the rest to charity.

In the same article, Kyle Craven (Bad Luck Brian) argues that converting to NFTs is " The only way memes can be controlled".

The future of the meme economy

In the distant future, every meme will appear in the form of an NFT, and people will have the opportunity to start investing in some memes before they become popular. Like today's NFT, those famous memes will also sell well, and for those new investors who don't have enough funds, investing in some newly created memes will also be a good choice.

The meme economy is free and open, smart meme creators can use existing memes as Create templates, and in return, they will also hand over ownership of new memes to the original creators. In the meme economy, memes are used for investment, creation, and design templates, and their distribution and "spread" can be tracked in real time.

Meme creators are well deserved millionaires and there will be more and more , taking meme production and planning as his profession.

In the future, any intellectual property will eventually exist in the form of NFT. NFT has become "the largest asset class in the blockchain".

I'm pretty sure the meme economy is on track.