After a fly debut, here’s what lies ahead for LooksRare

Lavina Daryanani
Source: Decrypt

With every passing day, NFTs are presenting themselves as a savvy investment option to market participants. Hand-picking and trading the right tokens have the potential to make certain traders, a millionaire overnight. On the contrary, stepping into the industry out of the fear of missing out makes traders prone to losses.

Now, apart from dealing with non-fungible tokens, people from the crypto space now have another new way to make profits, thanks to the LOOKS token.

In a period of less than a week, LooksRare has more than doubled in value, having appreciated from around $3 to over $6.5. At the time of writing, this token was seen revolving around its newly-created all-time high.

Source: CMC

Launched on 10 January this year, LooksRare is a novel NFT marketplace. Well, until now, OpenSea was ruling the NFT space, but now, looks like things have already started changing.

LooksRare doesn’t want to come off as an OpenSea copy. It rather wants to challenge OpenSea and other major NFT markets to catch up to it. It is doing so by combining non-fungible tokens with DeFi. This means, using the LooksRare platform, one can buy and sell digital art and simultaneously take advantage of the project’s internal staking tools.

Head to Head stats: OpenSea v. LooksRare

Ever since its launch, LooksRare has been on a record-breaking spree. From 11 January until now, this new platform has dealt with more daily volume relative to OpenSea. As per data from Dune Analytics, LooksRare recorded its highest volume of $822.344 million in a single day yesterday, largely outpacing OpenSeas’s $194.863 million.

Source: Dune Analytics

Despite dominating the proceedings on the volume front, LooksRare has been lagging behind on the user count end. OpenSea, has been able to retain the majority of its users, while the number on LooksRare has started, sort of, depleting already.

Source: Dune Analytics

Thus, it can be said that the limited users [2000-3000] in the latter’s arena have been mass buying/selling on the platform since inception. If that is indeed the case, then LooksRare will have to pull up its socks and attract new users to continue making its presence felt in the NFT market.

Additionally, as far as the LOOKS token is concerned, investors have started leaving the market already. When compared to 14 January’s 20.9k HODLers, there were only 19.3k at the time of writing. However, it is important to note that some holders are also staking LOOKS, which is not accounted for, by Etherscan. Hence, the actual number of holders could be a lot higher.

Thus, it can be inferred that market participants have gradually been cashing out, which is not really a good sign.

Source: CMC

Well, LooksRare undoubtedly had a banging start and managed to garner a lot of traction from community members. However, the next few days would be quite challenging, for it would have to prove itself and live up to its own pre-set high benchmarks.