Loot Holders Get $51K AGLD Airdrop Because NFTs

Despite being less than 48 hours old, a new currency is already emerging as a blockchain gaming powerhouse: adventure gold (AGLD) is riding the buzz of Loot, the latest non-fungible token (NFT) craze to captivate traders’ imaginations.

While AGLD currently has no playable game and no official development team, that hasn’t stopped traders from piling into AGLD – a token designed for a text-based NFT gaming project itself barely a week old. AGLD’s fully diluted market cap has climbed to $375 million at the time of writing, now rivaling big-budget blockchain games like Illuvium’s ILV and The Sandbox’s SAND in value.

Major exchanges have also jumped on the text-based fantasy NFT wagon, with crypto exchange FTX listing AGLD spot and derivatives trading just 30 hours after the launch of the currency.

Much like the original Loot project, the value accrual has been both torrid and questionable, with some speculating as to how high AGLD can fly and questions swirling as to if the open-source community rallying around Loot and AGLD can iterate fast enough to justify the stratospheric prices.

Following last week’s release of NFT project “Loot (for Adventurers),” a host of related projects have sprung up as part of an ever-expanding fantasy “Loot-verse.”

Read more: The Latest NFT Fad Is a Text-Based Fantasy Game Building Block

The AGLD project might be the most successful yet, however. The fungible ERC-20 token was airdropped to Loot NFT holders, with each Loot NFT entitling a holder to 10,000 of the 80 million max AGLD supply.

The contract was created Wednesday night, and users quickly made and deposited into a liquidity pool on the Uniswap decentralized exchange.

The token has been astonishingly volatile since, with a 24-hour high of $7.70 and low of $1.24.

It currently trades at $5.10, meaning each Loot NFT entitles holders to $51,000 worth of tokens.

Additionally, on-chain sleuths detected significant institutional interest earlier on Friday. In a series of transactions, a wallet labeled by on-chain analytics firm Nansen as belonging to Alameda Research swapped over 355 ETH for AGLD worth over $1.4 million at the time.

Both FTX, the exchange that promptly listed AGLD futures, and Alameda Research were founded by Sam Bankman-Fried.

In an interview with CoinDesk, AGLD creator Will Papper said he wrote the majority of the code “in four hours” at a small airport in Oregon.

“I launched it because I thought it was fun! To say that I didn’t expect this would be a significant understatement. I’m just a community member like anyone else,” Papper, who is also a co-founder of decentralized investing platform Syndicate, told CoinDesk via Twitter DM.

Much like Loot itself, AGLD is designed to be open-source and composable.

The token can function in governance, and users are already using it to vote on a “quest line” where decisions are made in a text-based game based on vote totals. Papper also said in a tweet thread that the token can be used to vote on “future in-game credits, or future mints that build on top of @lootproject and adopt $AGLD.”

Minting decisions and other governance proposals will be executed via contractual permissions given to a multisig group consisting of Papper and other community members. (Multisigs are shared addresses controlled by a group rather than one individual, meant to assuage concerns over a bad actor being able to abscond with user funds.)

Papper told CoinDesk the other signers are a “number of extremely reputable community members who love Loot” and that “we’ll announce the members in due time.”

“Some members were friends, others were recommended in the Discord. All have very strong reputations,” he wrote.

While Papper and his multisig cohort currently have centralized control over the currency, he made it clear that he wishes for the community to take the reins.

“I made $AGLD because I thought it was fun,” said Papper. “The rest is up to the community.”

Editor’s note: This reporter minted and subsequently sold Loot NFTs on the day of the launch. He does not currently hold any Loot or related projects, including AGLD.