The Weekly-Wrap Up - 14th January 2022

‘Metaverse Marketplace’ Lootex Raises $9M in Investment Round

Spartan Capital Leads Investment Round for Multi-Chain NFT Marketplace

On Wednesday (12th Jan), Lootex announced that it has secured $9M of funding for the development of its ‘metaverse’ NFT marketplace. Investors included Spartan Capital, LD Capital and Infinity Ventures Crypto. The Lootex marketplace already has NFTs from 500 collections listed on the platform.

The Taiwan-based project’s marketplace will focus on ‘GameFi’ and metaverse NFT projects. Lootex CEO and co-founder Justine Lu stated that:

Our mission is to liberate game asset ownership and connect blockchain games to traditional players.

Emerging Competitor to OpenSea ‘LooksRare’ Launches  

New NFT Marketplace Airdrop Could Spell Trouble for OpenSea 

(Image: Decrypt)

On Monday (10th Jan), emerging NFT marketplace and competitor to OpenSea: ‘LooksRare’ launched with an airdrop. The airdrop was claimable by any address that had traded over 3 ETH in volume of NFTs on OpenSea before the drop. The airdrop gave $LOOKS tokens, with the token currently valued at around $3.53. The platform also incentivises activity by allowing both buyers and sellers of high volume collections to earn $LOOKS as rewards. The platform has already surpassed $385M in sales volume. 

The project has pseudonymous founders and a non-opensourced github repository, causing some to raise concerns surrounding the legitimacy of the platform. To incentivise confidence in the token, stakers currently earn more than 1000% APR in rewards, paid in both $WETH and $LOOKS. 

Tesla Store Adds DOGE Payment Option    

Electric Car Manufacturing Giant Accepts Meme-Coin for Merchandise Sales   

On Friday (14th January), Tesla added a DOGE payment option for merchandise sold on the Tesla website. Many are now speculating whether the platform will allow Tesla vehicles to be purchased using DogeCoin. The move caused the currency to surge in price by 11% and is currently trading at $0.19. 

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been an investor in and fan of the DOGE meme-coin. Tesla also states on its balance sheet that the company holds 48,000 BTC - currently worth around $2B.

DeFi Alliance Becomes ‘Alliance DAO’  

Top DeFi Accelerator Becomes Fully Decentralised

Crypto accelerator group DeFi Alliance has become a DAO (decentralised autonomous organisation) after raising more than $50M in funding from more than 300 Web3 investors. The project originally launched in 2020 as ‘Chicago DeFi Alliance’ with the aim of fostering development in the DeFi sector. 

A 'DAO' is a fully decentralised organisation in which proposals and changes are democratically voted on by holders of a ‘governance token’. A whitepaper will be published in the coming months and the DAO’s governance token will reportedly start trading in around 6 months to a year.