Is LooksRare NFT Marketplace Going To Be an OpenSea Competitor?

NFTs mainstreamed in 2021, and OpenSea was the main and largest NFT marketplace, which allowed you to buy, sell, and mint NFTs on the Ethereum and Polygon blockchain networks.

Other marketplaces are entering the NFT market, such as LooksRare, while OpenSea continues to evolve and possibly add new chains.

LooksRare NFT marketplace launched on January 10th, showing impressive numbers along with its native token LOOKS, and it claimed to be:

“The community-first NFT marketplace that actively rewards traders, collectors and creators for participating”

Deep Dive on LooksRare vs OpenSea Numbers

The analysis of this comparison between the two marketplaces are from Dune Analytics data. 

Let’s look at LooksRare’s daily transactions first. The highest volume was seen on January 11th with 3,964 transactions, on January 19th were 2,032 daily transactions and in January 26th 1,522 daily transactions, that is a 25% drawdown from January 19 and a 61% drawdown from its top, as you see in the chart below:

Now, comparing it with OpenSea since LooksRare launched, the majority of daily transactions were above 100,000, having a maximum daily transactions of 178,659 on January 15, as you see in the chart below:

The second set of data that was analyzed was the daily users. The highest was on January 11th with 3,540 users, on January 19th were 2,210 daily users and in January 26th 1,838 daily daily users, that is a 16.8% drawdown from January 19 and a 48% from its top, as you see in the chart below:

Now, comparing it with OpenSea since LooksRare launched, the majority of daily users were above 50,000, having a maximum of daily users of 75,529 on January 15, as you see in the chart below:

The last comparison was the daily volume, this is where things get interesting. LooksRare has surpassed OpenSea every day since its launch, having the highest daily volume of $842 million on January 19, meanwhile OpenSea had $202 million. On January 26, LooksRare had $519 million and OpenSea had $273 million.

In seven days LooksRare was down 38% while OpenSea was up 35%, as you see in the chart below:

According to the data, a part of the daily volume of LooksRare looks like wash trading volume, where an investor simultaneously sells and buys assets to create confusion, having some kind of market manipulation by inflating trading volumes.

What’s Been Happening With LOOKS Price?

LooksRare native token is down 0.4% in the last 24 hours, trading at $3.824. LOOKS is still down approximately 45% form it’s all time high of $7.02 on January 20, as you see in the chart below:

The cryptocurrency has a market capitalization of $685.2 million and it’s the 111 biggest cryptocurrency, according to CoinGecko.

It appears that over the last seven days both numbers and LOOKS price are not looking as good as everyone imagined in this new NFT marketplace. 

It hasn’t been a month since LooksRare launched, but numbers spoke and LooksRare appeared to be in a downtrend and it is not a big competitor to OpenSea yet, but only time will tell.