The N Project: NFTs of Random Numbers Hit $40 Million Market Cap

By David Feld and Robert Stevens

What if you stripped away all the fantastical elements from Loot NFTs—the parts that conjure up the first light of a hero whose life depends upon their “Ghost Wand” and “Gold Ring of Fury," and move Ethereum developers so deeply that they work around the clock to create a videogame around lists of virtual treasure?

What about if you got rid of all of that, and instead printed 8,888 character sheets containing nothing but numbers zero through fourteen in a blank serif font and told people to use them in “any way you want”?

Then you’d have an NFT collection with a market cap of 10,256 ETH (about $40 million) called The N Project. It’s the fifth-most popular NFT project just three days after launch, and the average selling price for one NFT in the collection is 1.15 ETH ($4,537). 

A cynic might say that the anonymous creator of The N Project, or n for short, is cashing in on Don Hofmann’s original collection of Loot NFTs, since Loot files can sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars and plenty of offshoots, like Bloot’s self-proclaimed “worthless” virtual cock rings and its associated BGLD currency, are one of the hottest things on Ethereum right now.

An optimist might say that the creator of n, described by a Discord member to Decrypt as a “huge genius gigabrain”, is even more abstract than Loot, and thus full of infinitely more potential since a developer could wrap those numbers around any game they like. 

Developers have already crafted psychedelic visualizations and bots that hunt for rare numbers (there are only six 0s), and there's a 1,400-strong community on Discord. By comparison, Loot’s homeworld is bound to medieval mythology (although developers could redefine, say, a short sword from Loot as a paintbrush for use in another game).

Another optimist might quip that The N Project is a genius meme since a Twitter account from 2014 that appears attached to it retweets speculative drool about the NFT market and MrBeast Bitcoin giveaway announcements. The creators must be having fun. 

Yet another optimist might guess that n's success is all part of Hofmann’s well-trodden ambition as a serial entrepreneur. Hofmann’s previous projects, Vine, Byte and Peach, only grew to success when online communities developed his embryonic ideas into rich social networks. 

The N Project is just another innovation—a riff on the mother project, which is composed of 8,000 different randomized lists of text detailing gear from medieval fantasy RPGs. n sits neatly alongside other innovations, including Loot Visions, which makes pictures out of Loot, Abstract Loot, which makes Loot character sheet loot like acid blotter paper, and a Loot marketplace called The Grand Exchange.

So far, Loot remains bigger than any of its derivatives or offshoots. Surprise released on August 27, Loot NFTs currently hold a floor price of 12.8 ETH (about $50,000) and a total trading volume of $226 million. But The N Project’s numbers are undeniably impressive.

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