Key Takeaways:

• Newly launched NFT Marketplace LooksRare aims to create competition for the current market leader OpenSea.
• What is LooksRare up against?

YEREVAN (CoinChapter.com) – 2022 brought NFT platform OpenSea $700 million in NFT trading volume and a new competitor. LooksRare, an NFT Marketplace built on Ethereum, is an upstart platform that went live on Jan 10. The team presented the platform as a community-focused Marketplace that will morph to whatever its users find more profitable and desirable.

LooksRare; new player on the block

Co-founders under pseudonyms Zodd and Guts created the platform and employed a small team of engineers. LooksRare revolves around the LOOKS token, which rewards users and could potentially attract Opensea customers as well. The said token went live at 8:15 UTC on Jan 10 on the largest decentralized exchange Uniswap.

The LooksRare marketplace indexes all NFT collections on the Ethereum blockchain. That means you can trade all the Ethereum NFTs that are available on OpenSea… and some that aren’t 🤫 There’s a 2% standard fee on all NFT trades (lower than the competition), and all those fees are earned directly by LOOKS stakers.

reads the project’s website.

Also read: NFT comes to television through Samsung TV integration.

LooksRare claims to have several services available already. Users can buy, sell and trade NFTs using ETH or WETH (wrapped Ether). The platform also offers its users to earn daily trading rewards and “earn a share of the platform’s trading fees” through LOOKS staking. The new NFT Marketplace provided a guide on earning the mentioned rewards and claiming “royalty fees.”

OpenSea; what is LooksRare up against?

The NFT sales boomed in 2021, especially in Q2-Q3. Thus the largest NFT Marketplace by daily trading volume, OpenSea, benefitted greatly. In addition, sources report a jump in the platform’s transaction volume to a record $3.4 billion in August 2021, producing $85 million in commission revenue.

According to the analytical platform Dune Analytics, OpenSea transaction volume saw an uptrend in Jan 2022, after the relative cool-off in Q4 2021.

As the frenzy around Yuga Labs’ “Bored Ape Yacht Club” (BAYC) and “Mutant Ape Yacht Club” (MAYC) came back with a vengeance, OpenSea enjoyed $700 million worth of trading volume in the previous ten days. The rest of the month could also prove profitable as the collectors’ interest in the mentioned projects doesn’t seem to fade.

Additionally, LooksRare has its work cut out, as OpenSea dominates the NFT sales by 98.5%, according to the analytical platform DeFiLlama. Its total value locked (TVL) stood at $14.1 billion on Jan 10, whereas the second-largest Marketplace MagicEden takes the silver with $71.2 million.

Also read: Collector buys BAYC NFT for $12K, sells it to Eminem for $452K.

LookRare positions itself as a competitor to the leading NFT platform, OpenSea. However, the competition might be too fierce to handle, as OpenSea currently dominates over 95% of the NFT Marketplace niche. Nevertheless, the new player claims it has several tricks up its sleeve to offer the users and spark interest. The quarters ahead will show how founded LooksRare’s hopes are.