Can New NFT Marketplace LooksRare Take On Leader OpenSea?

The bullish mood is yet to return to cryptocurrencies but that hasn’t stopped the NFT market from booming lately. A new NFT marketplace that aims to overtake leader OpenSea, LooksRare, went live earlier this week and has managed to make quite the splash on its launch.

Within a span of just over 24 hours, LooksRare saw its trading volume exceed $110 million. Since then, the daily trading volume on the platform has crossed $600 million within less than a week of its launch. The marketplace is going after OpenSea’s dominance by offering airdrops of its native token LOOKS to all users who have conducted transactions worth at least 3 ETH over OpenSea between June 16 and December 16 last year.

Offering such airdrops is not a new strategy in the world of crypto, with SushiSwap having performed a similar move back in 2020 as it tried to eat away at Uniswap’s market share. Known as a “vampire attack”, we also saw this move within the NFT space more recently when Infinite distributed 60% of its governance tokens to existing OpenSea users and tried to get them onto their NFT marketplace instead.

LooksRare is offering attractive incentives to users of its platforms as well as LOOKS holders to drive up its popularity. While its transaction fees are lower at 2% than OpenSea’s 2.5%, it has committed to sharing its fees as rewards among token holders who stake their holding within the platform. The NFT marketplace’s decision to give away 100% of its fees in the form of Wrapped Ethereum (WETH) could drive up interest in its native token.

In addition, it is also offering more rewards to traders looking to buy and sell NFTs in eligible, verified collections, such as the Bored Ape Yacht Club and Meebits. There is also a unique trading model for NFTs in place on LooksRare, letting users place an offer on any NFT which the holder can choose to fulfil.