Blur has managed to capture a large portion of OpenSea's market share. But will it last? Emerging NFT marketplace Blur may have engaged in an open battle with the one-time market leader, but the latter appears to be making a comeback, albeit slowly. According to Dune Analytics data compiled by sealaunch.xyz, the percentage of unique users on OpenSea has risen since it plummeted in mid-February.
At the same time, it was found that the average sale size per user on Blur dropped significantly after the airdrop. Since the event, the trading volume of CryptoPunks, BAYC, Otherdeed, MAYC, Meebits, Moonbirds, CloneX, Doodles and other major collections has decreased on Blur, but has increased on OpenSea. The governance token BLUR was airdropped to users last week. These tokens have even amassed a trading volume of over $1 billion.
As part of its power grab strategy, Blur updated its royalty policy, which states that NFT creators cannot earn royalties on Blur and OpenSea at the same time. During its November launch, Blur didn’t collect full royalties — it didn’t mandate that creators charge fees when they resell their digital collections. Instead, it's up to the buyer to choose whether to respect the artist's royalty policy. However, this was later extended to a minimum fee of 0.5% for royalties.
OpenSea reportedly needs the new collection to stop Blur from charging mandatory royalties. The latter then attempted to circumvent the blacklist by developing a new marketplace on top of OpenSea's Seaport protocol. The goal is to enable creators to receive full royalties on both platforms. Last November, OpenSea unveiled a series seeking to enforce royalties that must be deterred from markets that don't fully respect them.
NFT sales soared in February of this year, reaching the highest level since Terra’s implosion. Blurring mostly contributed to the surge. Its transaction volume exceeds that of OpenSea. Blur’s transaction volume soared above $1 billion in February. While numbers have since declined, the volume was reportedly generated by a handful of whales flipping NFTs back and forth to accumulate BLUR tokens through the company’s incentive program.
Cryptoslam, a leading platform that tracks NFT sales, said it would remove $577 million worth of Blur transactions from its data, citing "market manipulation."
It further revealed that since February 14, 80.5% of Blur's sales have been wash trades. In contrast, only 2.6% of OpenSea's sales during the same period were wash trades.
