NFT marketplace LooksRare goes live and lays down gauntlet for OpenSea

Newcomer NFT marketplace LooksRare has launched today, during another week of massive volume within the non-fungible-token space.

Adding to the growing list of NFT marketplaces vying to take on OpenSea, LooksRare is a “community-first NFT marketplace” that provides users with participation rewards and incentives for using the platform.

Revealing more in a blog post, the marketplace has already indexed every NFT collection on Ethereum, meaning that users can trade their favourite NFTs on LooksRare in the same way as OpenSea.

In addition, the marketplace takes lower fees of 2% – which is lower than OpenSea’s 2.5% – with a portion of those fees being earned directly by users staking their $LOOKS tokens. Users can also earn daily trading rewards when using LooksRare.

The marketplace said it is aiming to “build something better” than what’s on the market and provide a marketplace that “rewards, empowers, and gives back” to users – hinting that its main focus is on establishing itself as the main competitor to OpenSea.

OpenSea, which remains the largest NFT marketplace by trading volume, recently raised $300m in additional funding to bolster its position and posted a post-money valuation of $13bn.

In another swift move to take on OpenSea, LooksRare further incentivised users via an airdrop of $LOOKS – the native utility token of the marketplace.

Aimed at bringing the estimated $1.5bn of trading volume recorded by OpenSea since the new year over to its marketplace, LooksRare allows users who have traded 3 ETH ($9450) or more on OpenSea between June 16 and December 16 2021 to claim their share of tokens.

So far, according to data from Dune.xyz, only 5.7% of eligible wallets have claimed their tokens. The $LOOKS token currently sits at a price of $1.90 following its release this morning.