According to DappRadar, a digital world analytics tracker, the trading volume of LooksRare, a new Non-Fungible Token (NFT) marketplace that launched just a little over 72 hours ago, has seen its trading volume stand at $821.34 million, with 7,247 traders at an average price of approximately $104,000.
The platform was able to bring in this customer base by offering only 2% fees on basic sales and zero fees on private sales, compared to competitor OpenSea’s 2.5% fee on every transaction.
The project also allows traders to earn rewards in the form of its native LOOKS token for buying and selling NFTs.
The LOOKS token has had a meteoric rise, as the token has rallied over 76% from opening on Monday trading $2.49 to currently trade $4.40 as of the time of this writing.
What you should know
The premier NFT collection that has taken LooksRare by storm is the Meebits collection, which comes from LarvaLabs, the same creators behind CryptoPunks and Autoglyphs.
According to data from DappRadar, the Meebits collection currently the top collection on the new marketplace. It’s worth noting that DappRadar has included a disclaimer to highlight the potential wash trading going on with Meebits on LooksRare.
Other traders have similar suspicions of wash trading. A number of repeated false transactions have been recorded by journalist Colin Wu. According to Wu’s report: “Transaction volume of Meebits has reached 52,771 ETH. Whales are constantly repeating transactions to obtain Tokens.”
One of the major reasons LooksRare is gaining traction is because according to its internal documentation, it is rewarding buyers and sellers with 2,866,500 LOOKS tokens (over $10 million) per day based on volumes traded and will continue to do so for the next 30 days before progressively cutting emissions.
Another point of skepticism arose on Wednesday when a Meebit NFT sold for $49.5 million in Ethereum. Traders are claiming that the transaction was fraudulent, citing that the combination of LooksRare’s zero percent royalties and the implementation of LOOKS rewards incentivizes wash trading.
LooksRare is however giving OpenSea a run for its money as it is the top NFT marketplace in terms of 24-hour trading volume with a total of $426.59 million under its belt. OpenSea comes second with approximately $150 million.
