What's the Difference Between WETH and ETH?
What is ETH?
Ether, more commonly known as ETH, is the native currency of the Ethereum blockchain. ETH is used for things such as paying for the transaction fees on Ethereum to incentivise miners.
What is WETH?
WETH is Wrapped Ether. WETH is an ERC-20 compatible version of ETH. 1 ETH will always be equivalent to 1 WETH. ETH on its own cannot be pre-approved (no approval) for bidding on items. That's why it needs to be wrapped.
Once ETH is wrapped into WETH, it can be used for advanced interactions on decentralized applications like LooksRare. In addition, the use of WETH allows standardizing the exchange codebase (for potential support of additional ERC-20 tokens) and also helps mitigating risks such as reentrancy (and other costly fallback) that can occur with the transfer of ethers to unknown parties (e.g., the ask side of the trade).
Which should I use on LooksRare?
LooksRare supports both WETH and ETH. However, you aren't able to use ETH everywhere on the site for the reasons mentioned above. Some site functions are quite complex and require WETH to be able to make the interaction.
You can use ETH on the following features:
- Buying an NFT for a fixed price. It will wrap the ether to WETH before conducting transfers to respective addresses (e.g., seller, royalty fee recipient, protocol fee recipient).
You can use WETH on the following features:
- Buying an NFT for a fixed price.
- Making an offer on an NFT.
- Making an offer on an entire collection.