LooksRare’s native token, LOOKS, was reaping the benefits of a bullish broader market on Wednesday. The altcoin was trading at a 9% premium over the last 24 hours, increasing its per token value to $1.18, at press time. However, the said increase was hardly enough to shroud LooksRare’s declining performance in February-March. Taking note of the same, whales were aggressively offloading their LOOKS tokens on Uniswap.
OpenSea Vs LookRare
A distinguishing feature of the LooksRare NFT marketplace was its high daily volume count when compared to leader OpenSea. Up until the second week of February, daily volumes on LooksRare continued to best OpenSea, outpacing the latter’s by over $400 Million on some days.
However, the narrative has taken a drastic turn since mid-February. Daily volumes on LooksRare have struggled to rise above $200 Million over the past month and OpenSea has claimed back its advantage.
Although daily transactions and user count were never a contesting ground for LooksRare, it’s not hard to spot receding numbers on the platform. In a span of 3 weeks, daily users have declined by 77% and transactions have plummeted by 72%.
Whales Bearish on LOOKS?
Data from LOOKS Alerts showed that some of the top 50 whales were offloading their tokens amid weaknesses in the broader market. The outflows were particularly high on 7 March, with 5 whales selling the entirety of their LOOKS holdings in exchange for other tokens. All the 5 swaps were made for a dollar value above $200K and a single transaction went as high as $334K.
Price
LOOKS’ price action was reflective of the platform’s declining performance. Since 1 February, LOOKS was down by as much as 86%. A clear downtrend was established following a chain of lower highs. The only positive takeaway was the fact that a support region of $0.94-$1.00 held strong. However, it would take an enormous bullish effort to lift the alt from its recent lows should the platform’s growth continue to dwindle.
To make matters worse, reports from data aggregator NonFungible suggest that the NFT hype is slowly evaporating, with popular projects such as Axie Infinity and NBA Top Shots noting a decline in NFT-related sales over the past week.