Top Dog OpenSea challenged

4 min readJan 16, 2022

Opeansea is the giant of the NFT marketplace and almost dominates 100% of the market. It comes to no surprise as OpenSea literally invented the idea of an NFT market. During the bear market from 2018 -2021, OpenSea founders kept building and today we their success. Competitors want to get a piece of the cake but generally, the internet tends to be a winner-take-all place where new entrants and entrepreneurs have a very rough time competing. BUT OpenSea has an Achilles Heel and that is that OpenSea is built for Web3 but is using the Web2 framework that is fundamentally outside the core values of the cryptocurrency community.

It is a traditional, centralized, US-based company and offers no protection against censorship. OpenSea must block users in countries under sanction by the US. Instead of a token model, OpenSea hired a seasoned CFO and there is a strong indication that they are now eyeing an IPO. Web3 companies grow with the community and give revenues back to the community instead of filling the pockets of their main shareholders and VCs that are looking for an exit.

LooksRare is a great example of a community-centered NFT marketplace. With the launch of the platform, users that traded more than 3 Ether on OpenSea were eligible to claim their $LOOKS token. In order to claim $LOOKS, they also needed to list 1 NFT on the LooksRare marketplace. With this brilliant campaign, the platform got active collectors from OpenSea onto their site.

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How does the community benefit? There are 3 different ways to earn $LOOKS tokens. LooksRare takes a commission of 2% (instead of OpenSea’s 2.5%) per trade and gives 100% back to the $LOOKS stakers. The current APR sits at around 900% ! Additionally, for every transaction and NFT trade you earn $LOOKS (on eligible collections) that accrue.

LooksRare will launch their DAO where the $LOOKS token will be used for community governance.

I am very excited about LooksRare, not only because of their interesting model but also because the top dog OpenSea is being challenged. Healthy competition always benefits the entire ecosystem and forces in this case OpenSea to also keep innovating if they want to keep their market dominance.

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