Blur trading volume surges, NFT market welcomes new game changers

Since its launch in October last year, Blur has quickly become the main trading venue for the NFT market as a new player in the NFT trading market. According to data from Dune Analytics, the total volume of Blur transactions has exceeded 750,000 ETH and the transaction volume has approached 1.6 million. With Blur’s announcement of the token to be launched on February 14th and the start of the third airdrop, the competition between Blur and NFT head project OpenSea is becoming increasingly fierce.

Blur has risen quickly and surpassed OpenSea?

Blur is a NFT marketplace and aggregator designed for professional traders with many innovative features. The team behind Blur is composed of developers from renowned institutions such as MIT, Citadel, Five Rings Capital, Twitch, Brex, Square, and Y Combinator. Blur aims to offer traders better features and faster transaction speed than existing platforms. On October 19, 2022, Blur was officially released. Within three days of launch, the platform’s trading volume exceeded GEM, making it the highest-volume NFT aggregator, thus Blur is also referred to as the younger version of Opensea+GEM.

OpenSea is a platform for casting, buying, selling, and viewing NFTs, founded by Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah in December 2017, known as the “eBay” or “Web3 Amazon” of crypto assets. When OpenSea was first launched, it was just a 5-person startup with less than 3,000 active users. Now, OpenSea has more than 2.3 million active users. OpenSea has always been the leading NFT project and has long monopolized more than 80% of the NFT market share until the emergence of Blur. Blur’s strong rise quickly snatched up most of the NFT market share and launched a challenge to OpenSea’s head position.

According to the latest data from Dune Analytics, since February, Blur’s NFT trading volume has been higher than OpenSea, with 46% of the weekly market share compared to 36% of OpenSea. In the week ending February 6, Blur’s NFT trading volume exceeded 9,200 ETH, worth about $152 million, while OpenSea was only $113 million. In terms of 24-hour sales, Blur accounted for 33% of the market share, while OpenSea accounted for 28%. Judging from the data, Blur seems to have surpassed OpenSea to become the leader of the NFT market, but the actual situation may not necessarily be so.

Besides being an NFT trading market, Blur is also the world’s largest NFT aggregator, accounting for more than 70% of the market share. Blur aggregator gathers listings from leading markets such as OpenSea, LooksRare, and X2Y2, and allows users to trade NFTs on multiple platforms through a single portal (including its own portal), and these transaction data are included in the market share of Blur. Compared to OpenSea, where 100% of NFT transactions are completed within OpenSea, Blur’s trading volume has a lot of padding, and in the past month, due to the expectation of airdrops and token release, the phenomenon of brushing volume on Blur’s platform is also more serious. In a nutshell

OpenSea Siege and Blur Breakthrough.

Blur was able to gain a large amount of traction in a short period of time, which was related to its ultra-low or even zero royalties in addition to its airdrops. The royalties for Blur’s NFTs were set by the traders themselves, meaning that the original creators could not receive any income from the secondary sales if the traders did not pay the royalties. This operation caused a lot of controversy in the NFT market, and although Blur stated that it would later encourage traders to respect copyrights through airdrops, no concrete formula for royalty incentives has been released so far.

Due to the issue of royalties, Blur was surrounded by OpenSea. In November 2022, OpenSea implemented a new policy: seeking NFT projects with mandatory royalties must blacklist those markets that do not respect them, including Blur. Blur’s rise made OpenSea feel uneasy, and OpenSea intended to build a line of defense for itself through the new policy to defend its dominant position against emerging competitors such as Blur. The OpenSea team developed a tool for mandatory fees, and those NFT collections that chose to use full fees on their NFT could not be traded on Blur. OpenSea made a two-pronged attack, not only gaining the support of NFT creators, but also depriving its main competitor Blur of its NFT collections. In the short term, this policy proved to be effective, such as the new NFT series Sewer Pass from Yuga Labs choosing to ally with OpenSea and blacklist Blur.

Not long after the blacklist policy was implemented, Blur quickly discovered its loophole, which was Seaport. Seaport is an open source, decentralized web3 market protocol developed by OpenSea, which can be used for free by anyone. Blur used Seaport to create a new NFT trading system. Because Seaport was not on the OpenSea blacklist, Blur’s new NFT trading system could bypass the blacklist restrictions, and those NFT projects that had previously blacklisted Blur could be traded through Blur’s new system and mandatory royalties enforced. In response, OpenSea had no way, because OpenSea also relies on the Seaport protocol. If Seaport is added to the blacklist, it means that even itself will be restricted. Blur won the temporary victory in this blacklist rivalry, and as Blur’s rise continues, the competition with OpenSea will become more intense in the future, and this blacklist incident may just be the beginning.

Thrifty Blur Airdrop

Airdrop is a commonly used means for crypto projects to attract new users, especially in the extremely competitive NFT market, air drop has become a necessary means, which can quickly attract a large number of users in a short period of time. But compared with the air drop in the previous NFT market, Blur has made a significant difference in this air drop, and it has introduced some new rules, which also maximize the benefits of Blur in this air drop.

1. Multi-round air drops and long-term duration
2. Blur’s air drop has lasted for nearly half a year since the official launch of its project, and the third round of air drop will be launched on February 14th together with Blur tokens. Such a long-term air drop is rare in the NFT market. The continuous air drop has attracted a large number of traffic and user attention to the platform. Blur can surpass OpenSea in trading volume in a short period of time, and the continuous air drop of Blur has played a great role.
3. Multiple scales, increasing user attractiveness
4. In addition to the large number of times and long time of blur air drop, another feature is that its air drop scale will be larger than the last time. The first air drop of Blur was launched in October, and users need to list an NFT on Blur platform within 14 days to participate; the second air drop was launched on December 5th, and the air drop package was issued to all active participants who participated in the order and trading on the platform, with a scale of 10 times of the first time; the third air drop will start on February 14th. Blur officials said the third air drop will be the last and the largest air drop. The stacking of the scale of Blur’s air drop has raised user expectations and maintained the attractiveness to new users, which has created a large number of new users joining each time Blur air drops.
5. Introducing loyalty data to increase user stickiness
6. Airdrops can attract a large number of user attention to the platform in a short period of time, but its drawbacks are also very obvious, that is, once the air drop ends, there may be a large number of losses. Blur noticed this when formulating the air drop rules and introduced a new data element, loyalty, which is related to the user’s real trading volume. If the user has malicious brushing and false trading, the loyalty score will be reduced.
7. In the three rounds of Blur air drops, loyalty is one of the requirements mentioned every time. Loyalty will not affect the number of care packages the user can receive in the air drop, but directly affect the luck of the user when opening the package when receiving the air drop. The higher the loyalty, the greater the probability of opening a higher attribute package, which is rare, rare, legendary and myth. That is to say, the higher the loyalty, the higher the probability of getting more Blur tokens at that time. The introduction of loyalty on the one hand reduces the user’s malicious brushing behavior, on the other hand, through promoting users to trade multiple times, increases the platform’s stickiness to users, and plays a positive role in retaining users.
8. Tightly calculated, each round of air drop has targeted groups
9. Looking at Blur’s three rounds of air drop, it can be seen that Blur’s official product thinking for air drop operation is orderly, and each round of air drop has its targeted groups. The first round rewards users who are still active in the market during recession, attracting more people to use Blur for the first time. The second round of air drop encourages sellers and encourages users to use Blur’s ladder order.

Blur’s outstanding performance in retaining users is key.

The reason why Blur’s platform is so outstanding is primarily due to its well-calculated airdrops, but it is also due to its excellent performance in terms of user retention. Blur is a simple and intuitive platform that strengthens NFT infrastructure and enhances the experience of professional traders in the NFT market. In addition, it runs ten times faster than other NFT markets, allowing users to quickly capture rare NFT resources. Furthermore, its zero fee and customizable royalty rate firmly grasp the current general user needs. Blur is also known as the “best NFT watcher tool” for its professionalism and convenience.

In terms of data, Blur is more user-friendly for professional traders. OpenSea requires constant switching of windows to view different data, while Blur does not need this at all. Under the default settings, NFTs are listed in order of daily trading volume, and some key data are displayed, such as floor price, number of NFT owners, and various price and trading volume indicators. In addition, the rarity of all NFTs, the estimated collection value, and even a rough investment income statement can be tracked. For those who wish to bottom-out, Blur also provides corresponding tools. All NFT series have a floor price depth analysis chart, which can show how many NFTs are listed above each floor price. Combined with other data provided by the platform, users can more intuitively judge whether the current price is suitable for entry.

In terms of speed of operation, Blur is ten times faster than GEM, and can list all pending transaction NFTs in less than one second, and automatically update the list every four seconds. Such fast display and real-time update of data also provide great advantages for Blur users who want to snipe NFTs, and the probability of sniping rare and highly collectible NFTs on Blur is usually higher than on other platforms.

In addition, Blur’s gas priority setting also helps users gain an advantage and defeat competitors who buy NFTs through other exchanges or aggregators. Most importantly, Blur’s contract is better optimized than other markets, saving users up to 17% of gas fees.

In addition to many other NFT markets that charge trading commissions, Blur maintains a 0% NFT transaction rate, which is a great attraction for users. In addition, Blur’s airdrop program has quickly gained a strong following, and currently Blur has launched two airdrops, which have encouraged more users to join. Blur’s third airdrop will begin on February 14th, and the Blur token will also be released at the same time.

Summary

The emergence of Blur has broken the longstanding monopoly of OpenSea in the NFT market, bringing in a new round of competition to the NFT market. When the market is big enough, healthy competition will bring a positive cycle to the entire ecosystem to promote development. As a disruptor of NFTs, Blur gives us a glimpse of a more diverse NFT market. At the same time, its specialized trading interface and market + aggregator combination model also provide ideas and development directions for subsequent NFT market entrants. All in all, Blur is a very promising new NFT platform, and its future is worth looking forward to.