Disruptive Newcomer Blur Surpasses OpenSea With Blazing Growth, But For How Long?

Since the NFT boom of 2021, OpenSea has been the predominant marketplace for creators and traders alike. However, with the advent of a new competitor Blur (BLUR), it’s currently challenging the firm’s monopoly. As a result, it has stirred up excitement in the NFT space despite seeing dull times due to the prolonged bear market.

Blur’s Growing Popularity

The NFT marketplace Blur has garnered a lot of attention recently due to its meteoric rise in popularity after conducting an airdrop on February 14, 2023; which resulted in a significant increase in its trading volumes over the past few days. According to Blur’s financial statement obtained by market data, the overall trading volume for the month of February has already surpassed $450 million, marking a 150% rise from November 2022.

Moreover, since February 3 — prior to the debut of Blur’s native token BLUR — the marketplace has generated more revenue to creators in the form of royalties than any other NFT platform. In addition, net royalty revenue has reportedly reached its highest level in the past three months.

In fact, NFT collection creators are presently making more money from royalties than they did at the end of 2022. Furthermore, it’s to be noted that, Blur began increasing the amount of money it paid to content creators just twenty days before OpenSea changed its fee policy.

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Can Blur Sustain Competition?

However, all of these take place against the backdrop of a successful airdrop campaign carried out by the Blur team, which had a value of approximately $1,500. As a result, many have begun to speculate on the long-term viability of the platform in light of the emergence of newer platforms with comparable royalty structures.

Proponents of Hedera (HBAR) claim to have a superior NFT royalty structure where creators can implement & hard-code royalty payments directly into their NFTs at the time of minting. Gregory Schneider, the Deputy General Council at Hedera, announced the availability of the new NFT function last month in a brief video. This new feature will enable NFT artists to receive their royalties right at the protocol level. At the time of writing, HBAR’s price presently trades for $0.071 with a market cap of roughly $2 billion.

Nonetheless, Blur has announced that there will be a second season of the airdrop, during which both listing points and bidding points will be boosted by 100% until April 1st, 2023. According to the team, Blur’s Bidding Pools have reached a new high of $143.51 million in TVL which will be later distributed in Blur’s season 2 airdrop. As things stand, the price of BLUR is currently trading at $0.84 which represents a decrease of  3.17% over the past 24 hours, in contrast to a drop of 30.78% over the last seven days.

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