Bitcoin is great, but real crypto innovation has moved elsewhere

Something is brewing, and those with finely tuned noses can smell it. As traders have come to expect, Bitcoin (BTC) is doing “Bitcoin things” by bouncing around between the usual “key” support and resistance levels, and to be honest, it’s all starting to feel a bit boomerish.

Bitcoin’s long-awaited “moon” depended on institutional investor buy-in, breaking the previous all-time high at $19,000 and a set of other firmly held beliefs. Well, all that happened, and the run to $64,900 exceeded many investors’ wildest dreams. But despite this, the entire BTC situation just feels predictable and boring if you are of the opinion that the top-ranked cryptocurrency will eventually top out around $100,000 in the current bull market.

So, back to what else is brewing…

Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO) are hot, nonfungible tokens (NFT) are hot, play-to-earn gaming is hot, and metaverses are hot.

This is where the real heads are right now — speculating, building, pondering, networking and doing shit that actually matters. And what is unique about those who are really putting in work in the trenches of crypto is that this grassroots approach and bottom-up building trend is leading to some of the space’s most groundbreaking projects.

Take Dom Hofmann’s “Loot” project as an example, or the recent Good Bridging and BridgeLoot drops in the Avalanche ecosystem.

LOOT- randomized adventurer gear- no images or stats. intentionally omitted for others to interpret- no fee, just gas- 8000 bags totalopensea: https://t.co/qSnRJ1FD0netherscan: https://t.co/bF9p0RSHX2available via contract only. not audited. mint at your own risk pic.twitter.com/uLukzFayUK

— dom (@dhof) August 27, 2021

Rather than putting on a suit, throwing together some C-suite-friendly presentation and chasing after venture capital dollars, Loot was minted for free by interested participants willing to pay the gas costs, and the community ascribed value to the NFTs via OpenSea sales.

The value of new ideas was agreed upon by a flurry of discussions in Discord, and anyone with an idea was free to launch their own derivative contract where Loot holders could then replicate the minting and listing cycle again.

Will Papper’s airdrop of 10,000 Adventure Gold (AGLD) to Loot NFT holders soon became worth over $50,000 and catapulted the entire project to stardom and into the history books. It was essentially the Yearn.finance of NFTs, some would say.

There’s a seismic shift at hand

What’s unique and intriguing about Loot is that it has set the precedent for what is becoming a new drop model in the space. The process involves creating a product (whether it be an NFT or a protocol), mentioning it to an interested community, and allowing them to mint tokens for free within the 7,777–10,000 supply range. After that, creators let the community, speculators, believers and OpenSea do the rest.

Hofmann encouraged the entire fam to do what they wanted with the project — he essentially said, “This is yours! Go and build, my children!” The anon genius behind the Good Bridging (GB) token drop also did the same but with even less guidance.

Basically, 16,000 early users of Avalanche’s Ethereum-to-Avalanche bridge got an 895-GB token airdrop, which at its peak price of $2.60 per GB was worth about $2,300. Not too shabby, eh?

To add to this, GB holders who didn’t immediately liquidate the drop were eligible to mint a gasless BridgeLoot NFT as a reward, and a few hours later, the Avalanche-based NFT marketplace Snowflake verified and listed BridgeLoot, where many holders listed their NFTs for 20–100 AVAX.

From a markets perspective, money chases after money. Investors chase after liquidity, and that’s part of what drives price action within markets.

We see this happening with all the layer-one incentive launches where hundreds of millions of dollars are shifting from Ether (ETH) to Fantom (FTM), or ETH to Arbitrum (ARB), or ETH to Avalanche (AVAX), or ETH to Terra (LUNA), or ETH and USD Coin (USDC) to Web 3.0-based decentralized exchanges like dYdX and GMX.

The point is that crypto is driven by liquidity and trends. The whole Loot phenomenon let the cat out of the bag and enlightened builders on a feature that has always been present but only recently uncovered.

Bottom-up fundraises, NFTs with utility in metaverses, DAOs and the great liquidity suck into a layer-two ecosystem are here to stay.

The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Cointelegraph.com. Every investment and trading move involves risk, you should conduct your own research when making a decision.