LooksRare on Track to Overtake OpenSea in Market Share

A new non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace LooksRare launched with a bang last week, transacting over $1 billion in sales after debuting only on January 10. Total sales figures are now more than 40 percent of leading NFT platform OpenSea’s entire sales volume for the past week, according to DappRadar. Interestingly, the latest NFT platform LooksRare achieved such a large sales volume with only a fraction of the users of OpenSea. For instance, on January 13, LooksRare’s sales volumes were more than five times higher than OpenSea, yet it did so with less than 3,000 users, compared to OpenSea’s 70,000. The platform’s incentive structure reveals how this has been possible. As part of the launch, LooksRare offered a free airdrop of LOOKS tokens to OpenSea users who transacted at least 3 ETH worth about $9,630 on the marketplace between June 16 and December 16, 2021. This tactic is known as a ‘vampire attack’ when one platform uses incentives to lure their top customers. LooksRare is the second platform to have utilized this tactic against OpenSea, the first being Infinity in October last year. The latest NFT platform arrives at a time of OpenSea’s continual success, but also frustration across the NFT community. For instance, OpenSea has been facing technical issues lately, including a period of extended downtime which CEO Devin Finzer described as ‘unacceptable.’ He further assured that the NFT platform will ramp up the hiring of ...