BLUR is the new governance token of NFT market place. Blur that was airdropped to its users this week. In today’s article we delve deeper into Blur and look at the increasing competition in the non-fungible token (NFT) space as different marketplaces fight for creators and collectors.
Opensea has been the untouted winner and leader of the NFT marketplace after its launch in 2017. At its peak, Opensea was generating US$350-$380 million monthly according to Dune and is currently generating US$16 Million in fees. However, competing marketplace Blur has gained considerable momentum among JPEG slingers since its debut in October.
Blur is a NFT marketplace and aggregator. Backed by top VCs such as Egirl Capital, Paradigm Blur has been making the right noise since its launch in terms of its user engagement and trade volume. The platform’s founders and developers are active only through pseudonyms. For example, the founder is known as Pacman. Blur is created by a team of builders from Square, MIT, Brex, Five Rings, and Y Combinator and has raised US$11 million dollars from investors such as Paradigm.
Blur specializes with its enhanced floor sweep and snide functionality as well as their no fee policy, which has attracted traders with larger holdings. More than that, as an aggregator, it connects to X2Y2, OpenSea and LooksRare. As traders acquire NFTs, they can view their digital assets through Blur’s portfolio tab. This tab delivers information about rarity, value, profit and loss and more.
The floor price is essentially the lowest sale price for an NFT from a certain collection. It could be the price of the latest transaction or the listed current price. In terms of NFTs, Floor sweep ideally refers to purchasing all NFTs from a set or a collection at the floor price. This could be done by either an Investor who believes in the project or by whales who consider sweeping the floor is a form of price manipulation as it makes people believe that the NFT or its associated project has a lot of value.
On the other hand, NFT sniping refers to hunting for NFTs that are listed below their original value, either by accident or because the NFT holders have no idea of what the actual value should be, which is always common to newly revealed NFTs.
Blur has become more popular, as they operate faster NFT sweeps and snipes than other seemingly comparable marketplaces.
$BLUR’s max supply is capped at 3 billion tokens. 51% of it goes to the community treasury, 29% to core contributors, 19% to investors, and 1% to advisors. Currently, only 360 million $BLUR are unlocked and in circulation, which means the remaining 88% is currently locked.
<source: google>
Blur’s native token is BLUR which offers governance functionality. The first BLUR airdrop delivered access to these tokens in the form of Care Packages to users who were active with beta testing six months before the official Blur launch in October 2022. The second airdrop was for traders who were actively listing on the marketplace through November 2022. The third and final airdrop is allocated to traders who place bids on Blur through Feb 14, 2023
Opensea has been the most prominent NFT marketplace since its launch in 2017. Blur has been innovative since its inception, starting from giving out its beta version to traders to use and providing valuable comments, that went on to building the most versatile functional NFT marketplace that it is, today. Although Blur has steadily become the preferred marketplace for pro traders, since their announcement of airdrops, they have seen a monumental surge in their user engagements.
Blur has a higher average trade size to that of Opensea. Since its launch, Blur has surpassed Opensea in October, when the average trade size was $244 for blur and $213 for Opensea. With bigger adoption and shift of traders to Blur, the current average trade size stands at$1,259 for Blur and $276 for Opensea for the first week of February.
<source: Dune Analytics>
Although Blur seems to be the clear leader in the average trade size, Opensea still leads in terms of the volume traded and Blur is slowly catching up with mints and may soon surpass it. For the week ending Feb. 6, Blur’s NFT volumes stood over 9,200 ETH worth some $15.2 million, representing more than 25% of OpenSea’s volume, according to Nansen.
<source: Nansen>
Since October 20, Blur has literally taken the lead in the NFT aggregator space, substantially dominating its close competitors, GEM, Genie and X2Y2. They took a jab at Opensea recently by suggesting that in order for creators to collect full royalties on its platform, collections will need to blocklist OpenSea, which enforces full royalties for new projects that launch on its platform.
Blur’s rise is similar to that of the Looksrare NFT marketplace, which saw an increase in users when it decided to airdrop 120 million LOOKS tokens, or 12% of the total supply, to the Looksrare community in 2021. The NFT marketplace Blur is ranked 6th in terms of all-time volume with $1.27 billion. It is below NFT markets such as Magic Eden’s $2.08 billion, Looksrare’s $1.7 billion, and Opensea tops the chart with $34.5 billion.
From a technical perspective, Blur stands tall among other NFT marketplaces and aggregators and its use during the Art Gobblers mint is a testament to this fact. With experts claiming it to be a NFT flipper’s paradise, it’s still early days for Blur with the platform’s target audience being mostly expert traders. Nonetheless Blur is clearly on its way to becoming a valuable and lasting piece of Web3 infrastructure.
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