The Traveler Loot NFT

Open source text based NFTs as a building block for Web3 Marketing 👀

Published in

trips-community

8 min readDec 20, 2021

So, traveler, you like old towns, climbing, the Taj Mahal and traveling by bus? Your friends say you are wise? And you speak English? 2… what? You are a head of growth, like to stay in apartments and own a notebook?

This article is targeted at the travel industry and I am assuming you don’t know much about crypto. If you are an experienced NFT player,a more technical and precise website + verified smart contracts will be available.
🎉 Update 19th of January 2022: We deployed the smart contract on ETH.
It cost $2296 and it’s not active for minting yet.
You can read the contract here.

🎉 Update: minting goes live the 3rd February 2022 on https://www.travelerloot.com

🧪 OUR EXPERIMENTAL PHASE

For years, we have been trying to introduce the travel industry to Web3.
We were only partially successful, so we decided to focus on something more productive. They’ll come when they’re ready.

This decision freed us from the self-inflicted and thankless task of educating people and opened a new world of fun for us in experimenting with Web3.

I don’t say “fun” lightly: we are literally playing, getting our hands dirty, doing slightly dangerous things and learning a ton in the process.

Fun is serious stuff: it’s where ideas are born.

The adults in the room may look at us condescendingly, but we don’t mind, we’re here to learn, not to be taken seriously.

Once in a while we come back home and say “Look Dad! Look Mum!” proudly showing how we have created a world-changing…thing.

Most of the time, it is not really world-changing.
Not yet, at least.

But the stuff we learn is priceless.

And the seeds we plant may become forests.

Well, this is one of the “Look Dad! Look Mum!” moments.

Here we go.

🧒 “LOOK DAD, LOOK MUM! WE MADE AN NFT WITH SOME TEXT ON IT!”

Isn’t it beautiful?

“Wow, nothing will be the same after this!” said literally no one 🥱.

OK, I know. This makes absolutely no sense.
Let’s take it from the beginning and trust me for a minute, Neo.

Morpheus talking to your marketing department

There we go:

We created a smart contract and are going to deploy it on the Ethereum blockchain.
It will cost us a few thousand dollars to do so.

If you go to the website (which we will reveal later on), and connect your wallet, you will be able to mint one of these NFTs (it will cost you around $100 depending on how busy the Ethereum network is).

The Ethereum blockchain: each person is a transaction, the buses are the blocks of the blockchain. The ones on top paid more for the transaction fee, so they leave first. On the left you see the apps creating the transaction. See it live here.

Minting means: writing it on thousands of computers (Ethereum nodes), forever. Hence, the high cost.

When you do this, the program creates an image just like the black ones here above by randomly picking a few words from a long list in the smart contract.

There are over 260 words. We worked hard to create it! You will be able to see them in the smart contract when it’s deployed.

So, the program will pick ten of those words, create the image, and assign a property ownership title: the NFT.

Friendly reminder that NFTs are NOT images or videos or texts…they are tokens which certify the ownership of the asset (which can be images, videos, texts, tickets, a dinner with your wife’s boyfriend and so on).

The result is a black box with some random words, which is UNIQUE.
The possible combinations are over 100 trillions, and you just gave birth to one.

Your NFT now lives on the blockchain and we, the creators, can’t do anything about it.
This should give you an idea of your total ownership of this NFT:

❌ we cannot delete it
❌ we cannot move it
❌ we cannot modify it
❌ we cannot even modify the NFT factory. Yes, you minted it via our website, but you can also do it on Etherscan and there’s nothing we can do about it.
This means that if we decide that our creation was the devil’s work and repent… nevertheless, we can’t stop it.

Says the Ethereum blockchain once the contract is deployed

We thus created a system which allows you to create an NFT which you own 100%.
Then we released it in the wild and the Internet owns it now.

(In your face Web2, you can’t give this kind of ownership and freedom, can you?)

But what can YOU do with it? You have more power than us, but your power is limited too:

❌ You cannot delete it.
❌ You cannot modify it.
✅ ❌ You can burn it, but that simply means you’ll lose control over it while it rests in the Ethereum cemetery.
✅ You can move it.
✅ You can donate it or sell it.
✅ You can use it to access stuff (more on this later).

In sum, you can do a lot of things, but we can’t do anything.

SCARCITY: 10,000 IS THE LIMIT

The contract allows a maximum of 10,000 standard NFTs to be ever minted (plus some specials you may find if you read the code).
This is not something you, we, or anyone can change.

Small exception: it can be modified if the whole Ethereum blockchain gets owned/hacked.
It’s a $400B network, so chances this happens are pretty small.

So now you have a unique and scarce…black box.
Congratulations, all those years in college really paid off.

SO? WHAT IS THAT ALL ABOUT?

Suppose now that all 10,000 NFTs are minted and there are 10,000 people owning this NFT (I’m simplifying).
These people and their NFTs are sending some powerful signals:

“- I am in crypto.
- I am not afraid to spend $100+ for a black box with a few random words on it.
- I travel.
- I am eager to use this NFT”

This is a strong signal, will it reach the people who are supposed to hear it?

THE PEOPLE WHO ARE SUPPOSED TO PICK UP THE SIGNAL

Let’s say you are the CEO of a Hotel chain which is trying to intercept the growing demographic of high spenders, crypto holders.
You could go to Facebook or Google and pay for the privilege to get access to them.
This has two drawbacks:

Do FB and Google know who these people are?
They probably know who is interested in crypto but don’t have that level of granularity: owners of travel related NFTs? I strongly doubt it.
So, you’ll have to pay to reach millions of people, ranging from the fifteen years-old Shiba Inu trader to the NFT millionaire.
It costs a lot of money: you are targeting a wide audience.

What you could do instead is to announce that:

“Every holder of the NFT has the right to a special offer”.

And let us know about it.

The NFT owners will be on the lookout, and it’s going to be relatively easy for us to reach them.

So, that marketing money you were planning to spend on advertisement can now be used to give a treat to your new, often affluent, customers.

If you had a $100,000 budget marked as “target new crypto segment”, you could simply use that money to give them treats.

What is more interesting to an NFT holder: a Facebook ad saying “come to our hotel, your home from home” or “Book two nights and get one free if you hold this NFT”?

This could even pay itself or become an investment opportunity.

You could get some of these NFTs before announcing the campaign, and bet on the fact that the NFT price will go up after the announcement, because you just added value to them.

This could be done as a first experiment in order to get ready for when there will be millions of NFT holders to target.

DID WE JUST DISINTERMEDIATED GOOGLE AND FACEBOOK?

Yes, we did.

💸 HOW MUCH DO THEY COST?

The NFTs are free, but you pay the gas to mint them on the blockchain.
The money goes to the Ethereum miners, not us.

It’s the “FREE + GAS” model.

How much is gas? Anywhere between $50 and $100, on average.

WILL THIS WORK?

In order for this to work, we need many people to spend the money on the NFT (gas) and the travel industry to pick up the signal.

The chicken and egg problem but, hey, chicken and eggs were successful, so why are they always taken as an example?
Imagine if they didn’t give it a try.

It’s a long shot, and we have some work cut out for us, for the months and years to come.

HOW TO JOIN? TRAVEL PROFESSIONALS

If you are a travel professional, this is a great chance to get some free visibility, right now.

Head to the join form and let us know what you offer to the NFT holders.

👉 CLICK HERE TO OFFER SOMETHING TO TRAVELER LOOT HOLDERS 👈

The sooner you do it and the more generous you are, the in a higher position we will list you.

We will add it to the website and broadcast it to the whole crypto community.

That’s it, you don’t have to spend any money, just 5 minutes of your time.

And, yes, you are always free to leave.

HOW TO JOIN? TRAVELERS

Get an NFT or two and spread the word about it.
If it’s successful, you will get access to free stuff and maybe the NFT price will go up (if you get two, you can sell one).

Also: See them on OpenSea.

👉 CLICK HERE TO JOIN 👈

Thanks to Pingu, Badgerto, Richard Vaughton and the Trips Community for reading drafts of this.