This article comes from the WeChat public accountRbC Office, republished with authorization by Odaily.

text

This article comes from the WeChat public account

first level title

Part1: Why LooksRare can surpass OpenSea

As one of the earliest participants in NFT transactions, OpenSea, which has gone through the industry cycle, has shared the dividends of the rapid growth of the NFT market, and currently has a market share of about 97%. However, the user experience that needs to be improved and the recent centralization tendency have brought a lot of controversy to OpenSea.

For potential opponents, these negative elements of OpenSea undoubtedly bring opportunities. Among many competitors, the recently launched LooksRare platform poses the biggest challenge to OpenSea's market position. Since its launch on January 10, the platform's turnover has surpassed OpenSea for several consecutive days. On January 18, the turnover ratio between LooksRare and OpenSea reached about 4.3 to 1. This rapid momentum has made LooksRare one of the most concerned projects in the crypto community recently.

image description

Will LooksRare change OpenSea's current dominance? To answer this question, it is necessary to compare the respective characteristics of the two platforms.

In terms of LooksRare, its improvements to OpenSea are mainly reflected in two aspects. One is to improve some shortcomings in the experience of OpenSea, such as providing one-click quotation/cancellation, instant royalty cashback, ETH+WETH mixed payment and other functions. On the other hand, the economic incentive mechanism of tokens is used to fully mobilize the user's activity, which includes two points: one is liquidity mining, users can obtain looks tokens by trading NFT, and the other is pledge dividends, and the handling fee is calculated in WETH 100% return to users who pledged LOOKS token on LooksRare.

From the data point of view, the pressure that LooksRare brings to OpenSea is due to its token incentive model: From the comparison of recent transaction data between LooksRare and OpenSea: Although the transaction amount of LooksRare has exceeded OpenSea for several consecutive days recently, the number of users The comparison with the number of transfers has been greatly unbalanced. Taking the latest complete trading day (January 18) as an example, the transaction amount ratio between LooksRare and OpenSea was about 4.3 to 1, but the number of users between them was 1:45 , and the number of transfers reached 1:92 (below).

Chart 2 Comparison of the number of users between LooksRare and OpenSea in the near future (unit: person)

Chart 3 Comparison of recent transfer times between LooksRare and OpenSea (unit: pen)

image description

Chart 4 The recent comparison of LooksRare and OpenSea user participation by hour, the two curves do not show a particularly large fluctuation (unit: person)

Chart 5 The recent comparison of the hourly transaction volume of LooksRare and OpenSea users, the sudden outbreak of LooksRare's transaction volume is particularly obvious in certain hours every day, or even in a certain hour (unit: USD)

image description

Figure 6. The comparison between LooksRare and OpenSea users’ hourly transfers recently. It can be seen that LooksRare will have a relatively different transfer peak at a fixed time every day (unit: pen)

From the above data analysis, although the idea of ​​LooksRare is to hope that users can change from "airdrop recipients" to "platform users", and then enrich the number and types of products in the initial stage of the platform, and finally realize the surpassing of OpenSea, but this The goal is far from being achieved. At least for now, it is more "platform arbitrageurs" that support the trading volume of LooksRare.

first level title

Part2: Can LooksRare lead the development of web3.0?

Going back to the competition between OpenSea and LooksRare, the reason why the competition between the two has attracted the attention of many parties is that to some extent, this is not simply a competition between NFT trading tracks, but also an The battle for the right to speak in web3.0.

Although there is still a lack of a recognized authoritative definition, "decentralization" has long been considered one of the important connotations of web3.0. Due to the decentralized confirmation function of digital ownership, NFT is regarded as a key step for Web2.0 users to transfer to web3.0, and OpenSea, as the largest trading platform for NFT, is also considered to be the most likely to be the first to realize web3 One of the products of the .0 concept.

In some links, OpenSea does demonstrate the openness of decentralization, for example: it naturally builds a wallet system, the transaction process is recorded on ETH, and there is no centralized review process when users create NFT. However, on the other hand, OpenSea seems to lack an important decentralized feature of web3.0: the closer connection between brands and communities. A typical case is its previous IPO tendency, which means that OpenSea may share the results of the joint efforts of users with Web2 residents. From the perspective of the community, this behavior obviously does not conform to the concept of web3.0. Potential competitors, including LooksRare, also use the concept of "benefit sharing" to arouse the crowd's sentiment towards OpenSea, thus occupying a place on the web3.0 track.

First, whether relevant mechanisms can be designed to avoid the large-scale phenomenon of brushing (such as avoiding transaction mining dividends to cover handling fee costs, etc.), so as to encourage traders to trade normally on LooksRare instead of speculative arbitrage. If platform tokens are concentrated in the hands of several arbitrage institutions, the subsequent operations of the platform will continue to be in a relatively passive position.

epilogue

Second, whether the data can be kept open, transparent and traceable through methods such as pledged assets on the chain, which is a necessary condition for maintaining user confidence and avoiding asset runs;

Three, whether it is possible to improve the user experience of the LooksRare platform as soon as possible, cultivate the stickiness of trading volume, and transform LooksRare from an exchange to a normal exchange. In fact, a few hours after its launch, LooksRare was temporarily offline due to a DDoS attack, and some users were unable to connect to their wallets and list NFTs, which shows that LooksRare still has a lot of room for improvement in terms of user experience.