New NFT Marketplace LooksRare Launches, Suffers DDoS Attack

A new NFT Marketplace, LooksRare, has been launched. The platform claims it’s a community-oriented marketplace and plans to index all NFTs on Ethereum blockchain.

With over $20 billion in trading volume last year, the NFT space has grown into a major market. But it has been primarily dominated by OpenSea, which accounted for almost $14 billion of last year’s sales. LooksRare appears intent on changing that.

LooksRare Targets OpenSea Users

The new marketplace, which has two anonymous co-founders and a team of 9 engineers, has already launched its attack plan. It intends to attract users with its LOOKS native token. The token went live yesterday and is already trading on Uniswap.

It plans to attract big NFT spenders from OpenSea by giving them LOOKS for free. Anyone that has traded over 3 ETH on OpenSea between June 16 and December 16, 2021, can claim the tokens. 

This poaching of existing users is called a vampire attack in crypto, and LooksRare isn’t the first to try it on OpenSea. Another NFT marketplace, Infinity, also tried it after launching in October 2021.

Beyond enticing existing OpenSea users, LooksRare plans to reward users whenever they trade an NFT. It will also reward those who stake the LOOKS token and promise a 30,400% APR. It also looks to entice more users with its lower 2% standard fee.

LooksRare Suffers DDoS Attack

Hours after its launch, the LooksRare website was inaccessible because it suffered a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. Some users revealed that they could not connect their wallets and list their NFTs. 

Poked the bear.

The site is down atm under DDoS.

Working on getting it back up now. https://t.co/QArH4V6WZh

— LooksRare 👀💎 – NFT Marketplace (@LooksRareNFT) January 10, 2022

The team soon had the site back online though it was revealed that the wallet issue persists, with some users still coming up with other tethering problems.

NFT Tokens Lost 3.5% of Market Cap in 24 Hours

While the trading volume on OpenSea has risen above $2 billion in the first ten days of this new year, the growing interest and trading volume of NFTs hasn’t translated to a green run for NFT tokens.

According to available data on Coingecko, only Ecomi’s OMI token saw a price rise of less than 1% amongst the top 10 NFT tokens in the last 24 hours.

Top NFT tokens like AXS, SAND, GALA, ENJ and MANA lost between 2-6% of their values within the same period.

Aside from that, the market cap of tokens in the space lost close to 4% of its value within the last 24 hours too.