Technology

NFT Volume, DAOs, and the Curious Case of LooksRare

NFT Volume, DAOs, and the Curious Case of LooksRare

I check the NFT marketplace volume a few times a day, just like you, to keep track of the expanding market for buying and selling digital signatures on various blockchains that point to photos and the like. We are laid-back.

The data is mostly consistent. Other, smaller NFT exchanges and various crypto games round out the list, with OpenSea volumes leading the way. If you want to dig deeper, you can look at DappRadar’s NFT marketplace data collection here, NonFungible’s related list of numbers here, and The Block’s amazing charting data here.

However, the data suddenly changed, and LooksRare, an NFT marketplace, raced to the top of the charts, swiftly exceeding OpenSea’s results and taking the top spot among its competitors in terms of volume.

NFT Volume, DAOs, and the Curious Case of LooksRare

Is OpenSea in jeopardy? Is it possible that LooksRare has risen to the top of the charts because of a stronger model, price list, or other business efforts? Kind of, however, it appears that a lot of nonsense is going on in order to make the figures look better than they are. So, let us talk about incentives and governance tokens to figure out what is going on with LooksRare and the financialization of everything in general.

Incentives, the data is quite amusing. According to DappRadar statistics, LooksRare has witnessed just under $290 million in NFT trades in the last 24 hours. The 24-hour total for OpenSea is $131.6 million. Have we witnessed a new marketplace king crowned, given how far ahead of OpenSea that single data point puts LooksRare? No.

If you want to dig deeper, you can look at DappRadar’s NFT marketplace data collection here, a related list of numbers from NonFungible here, and some nice charting data from The Block here. However, the data suddenly changed, and LooksRare, an NFT marketplace, raced to the top of the charts, swiftly exceeding OpenSea’s results and taking the top spot among its competitors in terms of volume. According to DappRadar statistics, LooksRare has witnessed just under $290 million in NFT trades in the last 24 hours.