LooksRare vs OpenSea

For all of you looking for a viable competitor to take on the giant NFT marketplace-OpenSea, it seems your wish has been rewarded. After a brief but successful beta period, the newcomer NFT LooksRare has launched its marketplace, one that is getting more traction than all other NFT marketplaces in the past that came out to challenge OpenSea. To get to the top is relatively easy (we said relatively!), but staying on top is extremely difficult. Will LooksRare manage to dominate OpenSea in the coming years? Join me as we explore their possibilities!

LooksRare is a new marketplace to sell non-fungible tokens, intending to become the largest NFT marketplace in the crypto world. However, OpenSea is the world’s largest marketplace for digital assets, with over $2B in volume in January. At this pace, OpenSea is well on its way to breaking its record of $3.4B in volume as of August 2021.

LooksRare Built an Aggressive Launch Plan Against OpenSea

So, LooksRare recently launched an airdrop for OpenSea users. We must give it to LooksRare though, that’s a strategic idea. LooksRare is gaining more attention by the day with its new LOOKS token airdrop. They came prepared with this one as the token remained strong even after an attempted DDos attack.

The so-called “vampire attack” started when LooksRare made the LOOKS token available for anyone who traded 3ETH on OpenSea between the 16th of June and 16th of December 2021. Data from its tokenomics page show that the LOOKS airdrop accounts for 12% of the total supply of $1B.

According to Dune Analytics, over 185,200 Ethereum addresses are available to claim between 125 to 10,000 LOOKS tokens. Shortly after its release on Uniswap, LOOKS made a significant rise of $4.71 before dropping to around $1.75.

LooksRare will not be the first marketplace to launch a vampire attack on OpenSea using an airdrop. Infinity, another NFT marketplace, did a similar concept when they dropped an airdrop specifically targeted at OpenSea traders that met the eligibility criteria. Still, OpenSea has a way of beating them well in their tracks.

LooksRare claims to reward users in a progressive approach. Asides from the initial airdrop, traders can earn LOOKS trading rewards when they trade verified collectibles. Also, there will be a 2% trading fee to traders who stake LOOKS tokens. On the contrary, OpenSea takes a 2.5% cut from every transaction without paying the end user.

OpenSea’s feat in the world of non-fungible tokens

In 2021, we saw a lot of marketplaces benefit from NFTs. Some of these platforms include Foundation, Zora, Superare, etc. of all these marketplaces, OpenSea was the biggest winner of 2021. The behemoth platform clocked about $14 billion in trading volume throughout the year, crossing a major milestone since its launch. 

Even with these numbers, OpenSea has suffered many criticisms from the NFT community for various reasons. In September, the platform came under a lot of heat when its head of product was caught using information from the company that wasn’t exposed to other traders to profit off the NFT listings on the marketplace. Furthermore, OpenSea faced a major backlash in December when its new CFO, Brian Roberts, mentioned that the platform was going public. Members of the NFT community hoped that OpenSea would make the project a decentralized one by introducing a token with airdrop for early users, but the IPO had other plans.

Verdict

At the moment, OpenSea has no token to offer, meaning it cannot provide incentives to traders as much as decentralized projects can. This creates room for competition, providing LooksRare an avenue to thrive. Will LooksRare be able to rise against the limitation of OpenSea and succeed in becoming the largest NFT marketplace in the world? That fact is yet to be certain as we all keep our fingers crossed and see how the year plays out for both.