NFT marketplace LooksRare goes live with vampire attack on OpenSea

An upstart NFT platform called LooksRare has gone live today, as more marketplaces continue to crop up to try to take on market leader OpenSea. LooksRare claims to be a community-focused marketplace that will develop new features based on what its users want.

The marketplace explained in a blog post that it indexes all NFTs that exist on the Ethereum blockchain so that they can be traded straightaway — and offers can already be made on them. It also lets users buy and sell NFTs with ether or wrapped ether (WETH), or a mixture of both, and they can make offers using WETH.

LooksRare was launched by two anonymous co-founders, known as Zodd and Guts. It also has a small team of nine, mostly made up of engineers.

A vampire attack on OpenSea

LooksRare is built around the newly launched LOOKS token, which is being used to reward users of the platform — and attract existing users from OpenSea.

The token went live at 8:15 UTC this morning and is being traded on the decentralized exchange Uniswap. It saw a peak price of $4.71 before dropping to its current price of $2.69. With a total supply of 1 billion tokens, that gives it a fully diluted valuation (if all tokens were on the market) of $2.69 billion.

The marketplace is hoping to attract current NFT big spenders who have already used OpenSea by letting these individuals claim LOOKS tokens for free. Anyone who traded more than 3 ether (ETH) ($9,400) on OpenSea between June 16 and December 16 can claim a portion of tokens.

This is what’s commonly called a “vampire attack” in the crypto sector, since it uses tokens to try to poach a pre-existing project’s user base. LooksRare is the second major attempt at a vampire attack on OpenSea (the former being Infinity).

Furthermore, when someone buys and sells NFTs from eligible collections, they will receive LOOKS tokens (although this won’t kick in until Tuesday).

The maketplace also charges a 2% fee on all trades, which are all handed out to those staking LOOKS tokens. Currently the platform is offering an extremely high rate of 30,400% APR to those staking the token. However, this does mean the current supply is likely increasing at a rapid clip.

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