We’re excited to announce that Blur is now LIVE!

To celebrate our launch we’re airdropping Care Packages containing $BLUR tokens to everyone who’s stuck around in the bear market.

Blur is the NFT marketplace for pro traders. We started Blur because we wanted a faster platform for trading NFTs ourselves. None existed with the capabilities we needed, so we built it.

Blur lets you to sweep and list across marketplaces, snipe reveals, and manage your portfolio faster than anywhere else.

To build Blur we’ve assembled a team with experience across MIT, Citadel, Five Rings Capital, Twitch, Brex, Square, and Y Combinator.

We’ve also raised over $14m from world class investors and traders including Paradigm, 6529, Cozomo Medici, dhof, Bharat Krymo, Zeneca, OSF, MoonOverlord, icebergy, Deeze, Andy8052, Keyboard Monkey and many more.

We’ve been building for the past 276 days while our marketplace has been in private beta. Despite being private, Blur’s aggregator already has the second highest volume in the space.

Blur’s marketplace goes live today and the Blur marketplace itself charges zero marketplace fees. In short, our marketplace, aggregator, and advanced trading tools are available to everyone at zero cost.

Out of the gate, Blur incentivizes traders to honor royalties via our airdrops.

Here’s why:

Traders want to maximize profit, collectors want to support creators, and creators want more royalty revenue.

Today, royalties are not enforceable onchain and traders already have many zero royalty options. For example, traders can list on Sudo which has 0.5% fees and no royalties. Their listings get aggregated on Gem which directs a lot of traffic to their zero royalty listings.

Even if royalties are not enforceable onchain, we can create an incentive structure that increases royalty revenue in the ecosystem.

Blur defaults to the highest royalty across OpenSea, LooksRare, and X2Y2. When traders list on Blur they can customize the royalties of their listings.

Traders who are already not honoring royalties on Sudo can list on Blur instead and set the royalty to Sudo’s platform fee (0.5%). They'll get just as much profit and get a much bigger $BLUR airdrop than they would otherwise.

Note: traders who set royalties above 0.5% will get an even better airdrop than traders who only set royalties to 0.5%.

This setup incentivizes profit-driven traders to contribute more royalties than they currently do. Total royalties paid across the ecosystem should increase as a result.

With that said, nothing is set in stone — we understand that royalties are a sensitive topic with many considerations. We will monitor our initial solution and work closely with traders, collectors, and creators to explore other solutions that can be voted on via governance once $BLUR launches in January. Blur’s marketplace fees are turned off so Blur itself will not make a single dime until then.

We will fight to achieve the best solution over the coming years for artists, creators, collectors, traders, and all other participants of the emergent NFT ecosystem. We will also create a governance forum where royalties and all other aspects of Blur can be discussed by the community. We’d love to hear from you!

Our goal is to make Blur a marketplace that the entire NFT community owns and profits from. Our first step is airdropping Care Packages to everyone who’s continued trading NFTs these last 6 months.

Care Packages can be opened for $BLUR when we launch our token and protocol governance in January.

In November, we will launch another Care Package airdrop for all traders who list on Blur. This second airdrop will be much bigger than the first. Read more about how the second Blur airdrop works here.

We may announce future airdrops beyond the first two at a later date.

In the meantime, to get the first airdrop, all you need to do is list a single NFT on Blur in the next 14 days. Check your airdrop and secure it at Blur.io!

P.S. If you have Blur points from our waitlist or participated in our private beta, there will be a separate airdrop for you once $BLUR launches in January :)