TL;DR Breakdown
- Opensea vs Looksrare battle turns fierce.
- LooksRare aims to challenge OpenSea’s supremacy as an NFT marketplace with skyrocketing sales and trading volume.
- With a low number of users and transactions but a high trading volume, LooksRare currently has doubtful statistics.
- LooksRare incentives will be cut in half by February 10, and it might just eliminate wash trading.
The cryptocurrency market is growing rapidly. With wider global adoption, the crypto sector is spreading its wings into different concepts, like decentralized finance and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). The consumer market is taking a major interest in these new concepts. Therefore, the market for NFTs has experienced significant growth in a short time span.
With the growth of NFTs, their demand has also increased. More and more people are now trying out non-fungible tokens. This has led to more NFT marketplaces in the field. The most popular and in-demand marketplace is OpenSea. However, it is facing challenges from its emerging competitors, like LooksRare. The rivalry, Opensea vs Looksrare, is now more than ever.
More NFT marketplaces are expected to make an entry into the sector in the coming days. However, as of now, the battle of Opensea vs Looksrare is getting fierce. It is the first time for another marketplace to challenge the dominance of OpenSea in the NFT world. Previously, OpenSea has enjoyed complete supremacy and dominance in the market.
The explosive launch of LooksRare
Towards the middle of January, LooksRare shocked the entire NFT community with its highly anticipated launch. The NFT marketplace made its debut on January 10. Within the first week of its launch, it was able to accumulate over $1 billion in sales. These staggering sales figures of the platform were significantly higher than that of OpenSea’s sales volume. Thus, LooksRare gained the immediate spotlight in the market.
The massive launch of LooksRare suggested that consumer interest has not yet declined for NFTs. There is still a lot of fuel for the NFT market in the coming days. LooksRare has a controversial yet popular incentive system. The platform airdropped LOOKS tokens to any OpenSea user who had spent 3 ETH in the last six months of 2021. LooksRare used these vampire attack techniques to lure the users of OpenSea by rewarding them generously. OpenSea has had a fair share of such attacks lately.
Statistical analysis of Opensea Vs Looksrare
Since the launch of LooksRare on January 10, more than $4 billion worth of NFTs has been traded on the marketplace. The trading volume of the marketplace is majorly higher than OpenSea. However, if we dig deep, we find out that the number of users making trades and transactions is significantly higher in OpenSea than in LooksRare.
With 350% more users and 325% more transactions, OpenSea overshadows LooksRare. As LooksRare rewards its users over trades, it can be interpreted that a small number of users are making large transactions on the platform. These large transactions will be incentivized accordingly by the platform.
LooksRare has promised to allocate 2.87 million LOOKS tokens per day for the first 30 days. It makes the daily rewarding amount mount up to a staggering $11.5 million. The users earn these LOOKS tokens on their share of the total trading volume of the marketplace.
This has led to the practice of wash trading on the platform. LooksRare claims that wash trading will be unprofitable for users because of its fixed daily rewards. However, with a flat fee of 2%, the combined volume has to be less than $575 million to keep wash trading profitable. Experts have analyzed this wash trading on several wallets linked with LooksRare.
An example shows that Meebit #668 and #6462 were traded a number of times between the same two wallets. These figures and statistics are painting a concerning image for the statistics of LooksRare. However, the rewards of LOOKS tokens are set to be slashed in half by February 10. Thus, it will make wash trading non-profitable for users.
Therefore, it can be concluded that the figures of the sales trading volume might indicate the dominance of LooksRare. But in reality, OpenSea is still superior and dominant to its marketplace competitors. Once LooksRare gets rid of wash trading, we will see a bright difference in total trading sales volume values.
LooksRare has challenged OpenSea with its sudden rise. The marketplace has made a statement in the NFT industry by offering new features. The community members of OpenSea were upset over the protocol’s no interest in issuing a token, which was a driving reason for many users to move to LooksRare.
Both of these NFT marketplaces will be fighting for the top spot in the coming days. OpenSea still holds the fort but LooksRare has surely provided a wake-up call to the platform. It might lead to more innovations and features in the OpenSea in fear of increasing competition of Opensea vs Looksrare. However, in the coming weeks, LooksRare has a lot to prove its credibility to the market and consumers.
Source: https://www.cryptopolitan.com/opensea-vs-looksrare/