Quick take:
- LooksRare is looking to directly compete with NFT marketplace leader OpenSea.
- The community-driven marketplace is rewarding users for buying and selling NFTs.
- LooksRare has airdropped thousands of dollars worth of LOOKS tokens to some of the biggest spenders in the NFT space.
Newly launched on January 10, NFT marketplace LooksRare has ambitions to grab a significant portion of market share from OpenSea. The startup was launched by pseudonymous co-founders Zodd and Guts, with a lean team of nine.
Since the launch, LooksRare has been seeing much chatter on Twitter. It’s been airdropping 120,000,000 LOOKS tokens (12% of total supply) to the NFT community in an attempt to lure users over from OpenSea. This tactic is known as a Vampire Attack in Crypto lingo.
Anyone with a combined trading volume of 3 ETH on OpenSea from 16 June 2021 to 16 December 2021 is eligible for the airdrop. Claiming of the tokens is only available for about seven to 10 days, and the tokens can be staked at ~850% APR. To claim the tokens, users must first list any ERC-721 or ERC-1155 NFT on the LooksRare marketplace.
While OpenSea began operating with financial backing from Silicon Valley VCs, LooksRare is operating with money from angel investors in the NFT community. As OpenSea breaks a new sales record this month, LooksRare is appealing to OpenSea users with its community-first ethos.
The marketplace has already airdropped thousands of dollars worth of its tokens to some in the NFT community. Currently trading on Uniswap, LOOKS is priced at $4.26 at the time of this publishing.
1/20
— MoonCat2878 (@mooncat2878) January 10, 2022
I invested 55 $ETH into @LooksRareNFT for 85,636 $LOOKS tokens + I got 12,000 tokens from Airdrops.
I paid an average of $ 1,90 per $LOOKS.
I own a total of 97,935 $LOOKS and am staking all of them.
So why did I invest in @LooksRareNFT let’s dig in! pic.twitter.com/MFTMJc0gpp
2/3 I am no whale but I received 1500 $looks tokens for just being a POTENTIAL customer on their platform. I can stake it at around 700% APR. I can receive more tokens for using their platform. I can facilitate trades on uniswap, literally BEING Wall Street.
— Konop 🍌 (@konop) January 11, 2022
Just a day after its launch, LooksRare has already seen a trading volume of over $100 million on the marketplace, making it a worthy competitor to OpenSea.
Compared to the 2.5% trading fee OpenSea charges, LooksRare is charging 2%. While concerns of wash trading have popped up, wash trading comes with a cost as every trade gives 2% of fees to LOOKS stakers.
With all of the trading fees getting redistributed to stakers and no revenue for the team at the moment, LooksRare is operating on a retroactive business model that gives the team profit if the marketplace does well and the value of the remaining supply of LOOKS tokens they’re holding goes up.
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