OpenSea competitor LooksRare exceeds $394M in sales

The new NFT trading platform already seems to be making waves just days after its launch.

Daily volume on NFT marketplace LooksRare has already exceeded $394 million following the platform’s official launch on Jan. 10.

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 premier NFTs that have taken LooksRare by storm are the Meebits collection, which come from LarvaLabs — the same creators behind Cryptopunks and Autoglyphs. 

Meebits are currently the top collection on the market at the time of writing, according to data from DappRadar. 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.”

Another point of skepticism arose on Wednesday when a Meebit NFT sold for $49.5 million in Ethereum. Traders are claimed that this trade was fraudulent, citing that the combination of LooksRare’s zero percent royalties and the implementation of LOOKS rewards incentivizes wash trading.