Blur Managed to Disrupt OpenSea’s Dominance

The NFT market is experiencing a shift. OpenSea, a marketplace that has always dominated in terms of trading volume, must be willing to bend its knees in front of relatively new competitors. The new opponent is Blur, which in the last 30 days alone managed to record a trading volume of $1.69 billion .
In comparison, OpenSea’s total trading volume in the last 30 days was only $334 million. Long story short, OpenSea is no longer the NFT marketplace with the largest market share when viewed from trading volume, and the difference with Blur is quite large if you look at the data collected on the Dune analytics platform .
In its comprehensive report on the NFT market throughout February 2023, DappRadar said that for the first time since Terra-Luna’s collapse last year, total NFT trading volume once again topped $2 billion . Of that volume, $1.3 billion alone came from Blur, and this was not due to market manipulation efforts such as wash trading .
So how could Blur quickly turn things around and seize OpenSea’s throne? What is the secret of Blur’s success? Let’s discuss it.
 
 
What is Blur?
The Blur NFT marketplace officially started operating on October 19, 2022. During its first two weeks, Blur gave away free $BLUR token prizes to attract the attention of the NFT community to use its platform.
On February 14 2023, Blur users were finally able to claim the $BLUR tokens they had been promised all along. In total, there were 360 ​​million $BLUR tokens distributed via airdrop , or the equivalent of 12% of the planned total supply. On its first day, the value of the $BLUR token touched $5. When this article was written, the value was around $0.55.
Blur is certainly not the first NFT marketplace to offer the lure of free tokens to its users. Previously, LooksRare and X2Y2 had previously implemented a similar strategy, which unfortunately resulted in an increase in wash trading activity on both platforms .
In the NFT realm, wash trading generally refers to NFT buying and selling transactions carried out by the same person, often with quite fantastic transaction values. The goal is usually to manipulate trading volume, or in this context, to exploit a marketplace ‘s token rewards program .
What happened at Blur was a bit different. Data from Dune does show that there is wash trading activity at Blur, but the percentage number and volume are still far below LooksRare and X2Y2. Rather than wash trading , the main driver of trading activity on Blur is the actions of a small number of professional NFT traders .
A flipper ‘s paradise
Since its launch, Blur has positioned itself as a paradise for profit hunters, aka flippers . Starting from aggregation features to portfolio analytics features, Blur provides everything to meet the needs of professional traders . However, the main attraction is of course that there are no platform fees that users have to pay every time they make a transaction on Blur.
This is clearly different from the approach taken by OpenSea, which basically wants to reach as many consumers as possible rather than just focusing on certain demographics. Blur on the other hand is here to facilitate traders , whose main priority is to make a profit from traded NFT assets.
Simply put, if you want to buy an NFT on Blur because you like the art, then you’re in the wrong place. This is proven by the latest generative art NFT collection from the Art Blocks project, Metropolis , which is still selling well on Blur even though the images of each NFT cannot be loaded due to network problems.
It may sound quite strange; How can a more niche marketplace like Blur beat a platform often referred to as the Amazon of NFTs ? If you look at the DappRadar report earlier, the number of Blur users is much smaller than OpenSea. During February, more than 300,000 people transacted on OpenSea, while Blur only facilitated around 96 thousand users.
However, even though they are outnumbered by the masses, Blur users apparently have much greater purchasing power. Well , not all of them, but only a handful of ‘sultans’.
A number of observers have pointed out the dominance of these sultans in Blur. In February, one observer pointed out that 50% of Blur’s total trading volume came from fewer than 300 wallets .
Then on February 21, as many as 4,000 ETH were circulating in just 8 wallets at Blur. For context, on its quietest day, OpenSea recorded total transactions worth approximately 5,000 ETH.
A famous NFT sultan known as Machi even sold more than 1,000 NFTs worth $18 million on Blur in just 48 hours, before finally buying a bunch more NFTs worth the equivalent of $13.9 million. The NFTs he trades are certainly not random, but come from elite collections such as Bored Ape Yacht Club, Mutant Ape Yacht Club, Azuki, and Otherdeed.
Apart from making money, they carry out buying and selling activities to harvest, aka farming, $BLUR tokens. When the $BLUR token was officially launched in mid-February, Machi was recorded as one of the biggest recipients with almost 1.85 million $BLUR he claimed.
Blur “Season 2”
Blur certainly doesn’t want this moment of victory over OpenSea to end prematurely. For this reason, they have prepared a more mature plan, especially in terms of distributing $BLUR tokens as gifts for their users.
Blur is currently starting the “Season 2″ phase, and in this phase they will distribute 300 million $BLUR tokens . Compared to before, the distribution mechanism this time will be somewhat different thanks to the ” loyalty score ” system applied to each user.
As the name suggests, the loyalty score is determined by the user’s loyalty to Blur. In other words, to get a 100% score, users must carry out NFT buying and selling transactions on Blur completely and not stop by other marketplaces . Combined with the number of NFTs traded, this loyalty score will determine how many BLUR token prizes the user will receive later.
As a leader for many years, OpenSea deserved to panic when its position was suddenly ousted by a new player. This panic is demonstrated by their decision to temporarily eliminate platform fees, while making royalty payments an optional feature — which can finally be said to end the drama surrounding NFT royalties that has occurred in recent months.
Blur itself implements a quite unique system regarding royalty payments. Users are not required to pay royalty rates when transacting on Blur, but they will be given extra incentives in the form of the opportunity to get more $BLUR token prizes if they are willing to pay.
Closing
If you look at the number of OpenSea users which is still greater than Blur, of course it would not be wrong if someone said that Blur has not completely succeeded in capturing the market share of the defending champion.
Blur basically only succeeded in attracting flippers who have been anchored in OpenSea. These profit hunters certainly do not represent mainstream users as a whole, but coincidentally this small niche has a huge influence on the movement of the NFT market as a whole, so that in the end Blur managed to overtake OpenSea in terms of trading volume.