NFT Market for ‘Professional Merchants’ May Unseat OpenSea – However Will It Final?

NFT market Blur has shortly change into a major buying and selling venue since its October launch.

Rivaling OpenSea — the biggest NFT market by buying and selling quantity and every day energetic customers — Blur at the moment instructions round 32% market share, with OpenSea at almost 49%.

Whereas OpenSea is a singular venue, Blur additionally serves as an NFT market aggregator. It’s now the biggest by far with greater than 70% of the market, per a Dune Analytics dashboard (aggregators permit NFT searching throughout a number of platforms concurrently).

Sara Gherghelas, a researcher at blockchain analytics unit DappRadar, advised Blockworks that the latest improve in buying and selling quantity on Blur is probably going correlated to the upcoming launch of the BLUR token on Feb. 14 and its third and closing airdrop.

Incentivizing NFT buying and selling

Blur has deliberate for a complete of three airdrops since its launch, not too long ago inspiring common weekly buying and selling volumes round $98 million.

Its preliminary airdrop rewarded so-called “care packages” to customers who actively traded NFTs through the bear market — to say, merchants merely needed to record an NFT on its platform. Care packages are supposed to be ultimately exchanged for BLUR.

An identical method was applied for the second airdrop — the place customers had been rewarded for itemizing NFT gross sales on its Blur.

Its closing airdrop, which is deliberate to happen alongside its token launch, will distribute greater than twice the variety of care packages. Customers are additionally in a position to tally reward factors based mostly on their bidding actions.

“It’s value noting that bids shouldn’t have to be accepted to earn factors in direction of Airdrop 3, which helps forestall wash buying and selling and inflation of factors,” Gherghelas stated.

Blur needs to be a platform for professional NFT merchants

Airdrops usually are not the one cause for increased buying and selling volumes on the Blur platform.

Blur is an area designed for seasoned merchants. These people already boast increased buying and selling volumes than a typical retail dealer, Oskari Tempakka of Token Terminal advised Blockworks.

“When you have a look at the information accessible on Token Terminal, OpenSea has extra every day energetic customers than Blur, however Blur’s quantity is increased as a result of it’s primarily utilized by extra superior merchants,” Tempakka stated.

The person expertise of Blur can be extraordinarily interesting to customers and sure drawing consideration from different NFT marketplaces with much less advanced options, Tempakka stated.

This sentiment is shared by an NFT dealer who goes by the pseudonym drew.

“You’re incentivized — 3 times, you could have a quick person interface and 0% market charges or royalty charges — so the extra you employ it, the larger your airdrop shall be — that’s why I feel folks gravitated in direction of Blur,” drew stated.

An unknown future

A query stays: whether or not buying and selling volumes will persist after the ultimate airdrop in February, after which merchants have obtained all their gifted BLUR.

“If the airdrop is profitable and folks get some huge cash, it normally causes a mini bull market or a minimum of a spike in quantity and shopping for — however after that, if there aren’t any incentives to bid at excessive costs — there’s a likelihood it might all come crashing down,” drew stated.

Tempakka, then again, stays cautiously optimistic in regards to the NFT platform. He advised Blockworks that Blur’s founder beforehand estimated that greater than 90% of the platform’s buying and selling quantity was natural.

LooksRare, the NFT market’s earlier darling platform, additionally pushed to encourage merchants with profitable rewards paid out by way of a local token. Experiences shortly surfaced attributing upwards of 95% of its quantity with wash merchants keen to maximise these payouts.

But when Blur maintains related buying and selling volumes following its closing airdrop, Tempakka expects extra NFT platforms to comply with its airdrop-heavy method to incentivize utilization.

“Time will inform how this performs out submit airdrop, however I’m excited to see how issues develop,” Tempakka stated.