Will the dark horse Blur continue to gallop, threatening the position of OpenSea? Blur is a "dark horse" that threatens OpenSea's position Airdropping hundreds of millions of dollars, the Blur project made the whole community stir. People call Blur the dark horse who scares the giant OpenSea. Will that dark horse continue to gallop or will we see the horror when the giant is angry?
The oppressed Blur is an NFT marketplace combined with aggregator. In March 2022, the project announced to raise $11M in a seed round led by Paradigm.
Since its launch Blur has suffered a lot of pressure from the giant OpenSea . Blur takes a different perspective on the issue of commissions between NFT creators and buyers. OpenSea requires a high commission to protect NFT creators, while Blur wants more flexibility and NFT creators can choose not to set a commission.
In November 2022, OpenSea announced to block NFT collections from being listed on exchanges that do not allow commissions, including Blur. OpenSea requires new collections to block Blur if it continues to disallow fees. Blur blacklisted and users cannot trade commission-free NFTs.
Oh horse Despite a lot of pressure from the giant OpenSea, Blur still did not falter. The project has applied many different measures including:
Reducing transaction fees to 0%,
Developing a novel user interface
Good incentive mechanism to encourage transactions
And the most impressive is the use of Use OpenSea's own Seaport to remove restrictions placed on Blur
All have helped the transaction volume on Blur not only not decrease but also increase. Until the token launch, Blur used 12% of the total supply to pay for the past 3 airdrops. At the current price of $1.33, Blur's airdrop has reached nearly $500 million, a huge number.
Giant's reaction Thanks to the use of many tactics, Blur has attracted a large amount of trading volume, not even much worse than the leading exchange OpenSea. Blur has announced the continuation of the second airdrop season. With the positive response of season 1, it is highly likely that we will continue to see trading volume maintained or even increased.
Realizing its position is threatened, OpenSea has updated features including:
Reduce transaction fees to 0% for a period of time
Allow adjustment of commissions for NFT creators (minimum 0.5%)
Unblock previous projects
We can see that these OpenSea updates have tacitly acknowledged seeing Blur as a real problem that can affect its position.
What will happen to NFT marketplace projects? The most obvious change we can see in recent NFT marketplaces is a reduction in transaction fees.
It must be corrected that the application of a transaction fee of 0% is not a sustainable measure. A project that wants to develop long-term needs to have revenue. However, in the past, NFT marketplaces charged very high transaction fees, OpenSea charged 2.5% per transaction, Magic Eden was 2%, LooksRare was 2%,...
The fact that new NFT marketplaces are increasingly reducing transaction fees like X2Y2 from 0.5% to Blur with 0% is reshaping the transaction fee market of NFT marketplaces. Having a reasonable transaction fee will benefit the long-term development of the whole NFT branch
The second change is the move to a more flexible model, the success of Blur has proven that users don't want to be limited to a framework that is supposed to be right by the developer, they want more flexibility. more freedom when it comes to crypto.
This is quite an exciting time as we can see more bold moves by NFT marketplaces. Does Open Sea have any plans to not lose its market share to other NFT marketplaces?