A new entrant into the non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace sector has seen its price and market cap explode this week.
The OpenSea rival LooksRare launched on January 10th, and the project’s native asset LOOKS has already surged in price by nearly 55%.
The token, which was listed by the exchange OKEx on Wednesday, is currently trading at $4.10.
LooksRare’s market cap also briefly exceeded $500 million on Thursday, though it has since settled to about $478 million, already ranking it 179th among all crypto projects.
The project, which bills itself as “by NFT People, for NFT People,” says its marketplace indexes all NFT collections on the Ethereum blockchain, meaning traders can access all the NFTs available on OpeanSea and other marketplaces.
Data from blockchain research tool Dune Analytics indicates LooksRare has been dominating the NFT space in terms of trading volume since its release. The fledgling marketplace hosted more than $551 million in trading volume on Thursday, a more than 6x advantage compared to OpenSea’s roughly $88 million on the same day.
In total, since LooksRare launched on Monday, it has hosted more than $1.37 billion in total volume, compared to OpenSea, which hosted about $281.7 million over the same period.
OpeanSea reached a valuation of $13.3 billion last week after investors injected additional capital during its latest round of funding.
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