CoinMarketCap Academy takes a deep dive into Blur, an NFT marketplace challenging OpenSea for market dominance.
Blur is an NFT marketplace with the goal of building a fair and community-driven platform for NFT traders and collectors. It was launched in October 2022 and has quickly risen to become one of the top NFT marketplaces on Ethereum, surpassing OpenSea in terms of sales volume. Blur particularly generated a lot of attention with its widely anticipated airdrop, a crucial part of its strategy to challenge Opensea.
Blur’s vision is to empower the NFT trading community. For that reason, Blur launched a generous airdrop to reward early users and liquidity providers. Token holders can participate in governance decisions, earn rewards, and access exclusive features. Furthermore, Blur decided to eliminate trading fees for both buyers and sellers. This sparked a major change in the NFT marketplace sector and forced other marketplaces, like leaders OpenSea, to follow Blur's lead.
Blur is built on Polygon, a layer-two scaling solution for Ethereum. Blur also provides an NFT aggregator, which aggregates NFTs from multiple sources, such as OpenSea, Rarible, SuperRare and others.
Its roadmap envisions the launch of a proprietary NFT minting platform, allowing users to mint their own NFTs on Polygon without any coding or technical skills. Blur also plans to integrate more NFT platforms and protocols into its marketplace aggregator, such as Solana-based platforms like SolSea and Metaplex. Finally, more social features that enhance the user experience and engagement will provide a more inclusive and engaging user experience in the future. Possible solutions are chat rooms, leaderboards, profiles, badges and more.
How Does Blur Work?
Source: Blur.io
Blur provides an all-in-one solution for NFT traders and offers unique functionality like
- Floor depth visualizations.
- Automatic metadata updates revealing the artworks of freshly minted NFTs.
- Trait-based floor listings.
- Gas fee presets to streamline trading efficiency.
This positions Blur as "more than an NFT marketplace," which is not only aimed at advanced traders but also long-term investors and users looking for high-quality infrastructure and user experience.
Also read: How to Use Blur NFT Marketplace?
Blur's airdrop — a total of 360M BLUR tokens — was one of the most popular and anticipated in recent months. Traders that traded over the last six months received "Care Packages," which ranked from uncommon to rare and legendary. Traders were incentivized to run up a loyalty score. This included matching the prices of their listings on other marketplaces and trading on Blur. Blur further incentivized this with its 0% trading fee, making trading effectively a profitable endeavor on the platform.
How to Receive the Blur Airdrop
Blur divided the airdrop into two seasons, each lasting for 30 days. Season 1 ended on February 28th, 2023. Season 2 started on March 1st, 2023.
You can farm the airdrop by earning points. You earn points if you list and bid on NFTs on Blur. The more points you have, the more BLUR tokens you will receive at the end of each season.
Some of the common point maximization strategies include earning points for listing, bidding and liquidity mining. You earn listing points by listing NFTs from high-volume and high-floor-price collections close to or below their floor price or top trait. The more buyers you attract, the higher your chances of selling an NFT and earning points.
You earn bidding points by placing bids on NFTs likely to be accepted by sellers. NFTs with low bids, low floor price, low volume, or high rarity are particularly suitable.
Finally, liquidity mining can earn BLUR if you provide liquidity to the BLUR/ETH pool on SushiSwap. This way, you can earn fees from every trade and also get a share of the BLUR rewards allocated for liquidity providers.
The Blur Team
Blur’s co-founder “Pacman” revealed his identity following the BLUR airdrop, and revealed his goal of building Blur to be the Binance of NFTs. He is a 24-year-old high school and MIT dropout with a Thiel Fellowship. He previously founded Namebase, a decentralized domain name finder, in 2018. You can find the entire story of Pacman here. Other Blur team members are not publicly known.
Blur Tokenomics
BLUR is the platform's native governance token. In contrast to OpenSea, Blur decided to put the governance immediately in the hands of its community and launch a token. Token holders can participate in the protocol’s governance by voting in Blur Improvement Proposals (BIPs). Voting power is proportional to the BLUR balance of an eligible address.
The total supply of BLUR is 1 billion BLUR. The token allocation is as follows:
- 40%: early users and creators through an airdrop.
- 20%: team and advisors with a 2-year vesting schedule.
- 20%: reserved for future ecosystem development with a 4-year vesting schedule.
- 10%: allocated to liquidity provision with a 6-month vesting schedule.
- 10% allocated to marketing and partnerships with a 1-year vesting schedule.
Roadmap Ahead for Blur
Blur leverages the profit maximization mindset in the NFT marketplace space to its advantage. Without marketplace fees, Blur was able to take the top spot among NFT marketplaces by trading volume. However, it still trails OpenSea by transaction count and user numbers, indicating that a few users are generating a lot of volume on Blur.
Also read: The Ultimate Guide to NFT Royalties and NFT Marketplaces in 2023
Time will tell whether this structure is sustainable. While Blur may be chipping away at the market leadership of OpenSea, questions remain over whether traders will shift their behavior once the airdrops are distributed. Furthermore, creators may retaliate against the low-fee policies of NFT marketplaces, although evidence may suggest otherwise.
In conclusion, Blur has forced the NFT marketplace space wide open and is challenging OpenSea as the leader.
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