According to Dune’s various analytics, the Blur NFT marketplace has surpassed the big giant Opensea in many key matrices. How did Blur pull it off? It takes a lot of effort and strategy to defeat an exchange like Opensea, therefore it couldn’t have happened by chance.
Blur is an Ethereum-based aggregator and an NFT marketplace that is known for its unique royalties and transaction fee model. By default, the royalty fee is 0.5% on the NFT projects however, the creators can set it to zero. The fee model is even more interesting as the exchange charges no fees compared to 2.5% of Opensea. This means that the sellers can’t enjoy 100% of the revenues on their NFT sales. Blur is more of an export-oriented NFT exchange that can aggregate the listing information from the other exchanges as well.
Blur Tops NFT Marketplaces:
Dune Analytics shows that Blur leads all the NFT marketplaces with respect to trade volume in the last week. Blur alone accounts for 79 percent of transaction volume, accounting for the greatest marketshare of $375.8 million. Opensea stands second with 16.1 percent and $76.5 million in the last week.
This huge volume margin shrinks a bit number of trades on Blur compared to Opensea. Blur achieved a $375.8 million trade volume with 261k traders (average of $1207 per trade) compared to Opensea which has a trading volume of $76.5 million with 200.5k trades (average 1207 per trade $77 per trade).
Over 94,000 users visited Opensea while Blur was visited by nearly 56,000 users in the last week. Comparing the number of trades and visitors, we can conclude that Blur enjoys more quality users than the Opensea marketplace.
The success of a newborn swap was actually getting to the competitors of Blur. In response, Opensea changed its fee structure and eliminated trade fees.
However, an exchange needs much more than low costs and zero royalties to claim the top spot on the NFT markets list, and Blur has a lengthy list of reasons for these quality users.
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1.     NFT Marketplace Burn and Token Airdrop
Following the series of events, on February 14, Blur launched its native token and air dropped for the Ethereum NFT traders. The activity started to spike on the Ethereum chain taking the Ethereum fees to the sky.
According to the Ethereum update EIP-1559 rolled out in August 2021, Ethereum has a defined base fee that must be paid for the transaction to be included in the block. The fee is dynamically adjusted based on network congestion and makes the fee more stable through burning. To overcome the impact of the huge activity generated by the airdrop, Blur NFT marketplace burned Ethereum worth $4 million and became the top NFT marketplace to burn the highest Ethereum.
Blur was already in news and it made more headlines by burning a huge number of Ethereum to lessen the network fee volatility. Hype or fame, the burn, and the token drop were actually contributing factors to making Blur a leading exchange.
2.   Blur Token Success:
Besides the craze for the airdrop of the Blur token, huge network activity, and Ethereum burn to contain the situation, the Blur token itself is a major success. The token is listed on almost all top centralized Exchanges except Binance. What’s more, the valuation of the tokens beats all its peers with a marketcap of $324, Blur has a fully diluted volume of over $2.43 billion.
The token is still in its infancy and the community believes it still has room for growth.
Blur airdrop has been a success due to the smart token allocation that not only helped enrich liquidity but brought mass adoption as well.
3.     User Oriented Marketplace:
Blur is a user oriented marketplace that incentivizes traders in many ways. NFT trading is a free marketplace and the one offering more perks takes most of the users. While other exchanges compete with low trading fees and royalty fees, Blur offers the following perks:
- Deep liquidity via “risk” airdrop incentivization
- The option to not pay royalties
- Fastest NFT sweeps/snipes
- Zero marketplace fees
These perks combine to provide a quality user experience and skyrocketing volumes.
Blur’s success reveals the importance of strategic incentives and user-centric design in creating quality products. However, exchanges like X2Y2 and SudoSwap showed the same spike in the past when they airdropped their tokens and Opensea was able to reclaim its position as the fad was over. The question here is, can Opensea reclaim its top position this time as well? And if not, should we expect a token from Opensea as well it still remains a tokenless NFT marketplace.
