Virtual treasure auction platform Lootex: Collaborating artist XST discusses artistic reflection, launches BSC airdrop NFT.

The virtual goods auction platform Lootex originating from Taiwan has been quietly cultivating for several years. Since the resurgence of market attention on NFTs last year, Lootex has engaged in more collaborations related to intellectual property (IP) rights. For example, in July last year, they collaborated with the independent game team Digital Craft "Animal Fight", in February this year with illustrator J.hao, and in March with the artist group XST on "Post-Futurism".

Considering the high gas fees on Ethereum, Lootex is also exploring the possibility of an NFT auction market on Binance Smart Chain (BSC) and today announced its support for the BSC NFT auction marketplace.

Imagining the Future of Digital Art

Even for Beeple, who sells digital artworks for astronomical prices, most of his works are still quite humorous. Similarly, artists collaborating with many digital artists like DontBuyMeme also tend to lean towards meme-style artworks. Collaborations like XST and Lootex, which discuss the possibilities of art, are relatively rare.

XST, an art group composed of Taiwanese artists Liu Cheng Jie, Dong Shi Xing, Ye Zheng Qing, Zeng Wei Xiang, and Zhang Yi De, mainly consist of 2D/3D artists. Due to their imagination of a futuristic sci-fi world, they have previously held sci-fi art exhibitions. After becoming familiar with cryptocurrency, they decided to NFT their works as a new experiment. This is just their first step in imagining the future of digital art.

Zhang Yi De expressed, "I am looking forward to the emergence of AR glasses, allowing people to get closer to virtual art. Imagine if you and your friends all have AR glasses, you can see floating virtual artworks around each other. This experience should be very interesting."

In addition to AR, there are more possibilities for the future of digital art, such as blockchain virtual world projects like Decentraland MANA and Sandbox SAND, where people can showcase their digital artworks in a virtual world for appreciation and exchange, bringing them real value.

Beeple once said, "Honestly, I think NFT is definitely a bubble. If we use the early days of the internet as a metaphor, there was also a bubble there, and then the bubble burst. But that didn’t make the internet disappear because the technology itself is very powerful enough to survive."

Regarding art discussions, whether "digital art" can be considered as art seems to have faced much criticism due to the rise of NFT, with many believing that it is merely driven by price speculation. However, if an NFT can indeed bring collectors a "aesthetic experience" and even have better presentation in the future world of AR and VR, people's perception of digital creations as art may become more widespread. We do not know if NFTs will last, but digital art will have a better future.

Launching BSC Airdrop NFT

Lootex's another new direction is to shift towards BSC. The high gas fees on Ethereum have posed challenges for many low-priced NFTs, where sometimes the transaction fees are even higher than the NFT itself. Additionally, platforms like DontBuyMeme, which combine liquidity mining with NFTs, have made the operational costs very high. With the low gas fees of BSC and the underdeveloped NFT market on BSC, it may become another growth base for Lootex.

Moving to BSC provides many cost benefits for NFT creators. Justine, co-founder of Lootex, stated, "Ethereum's gas fees are really too high... Once a client asked me for a quote, and just roughly calculating the gas fees for the NFTs they wanted to release... 6000 NFTs would cost $330,000 (approximately over 9 million TWD)."

The company is currently collaborating with artists to launch a BSC NFT airdrop event, and according to Lootex, they will airdrop "Doge Dad" this time.