NFT Marketplaces Compete For Users As Bear Market Drags On

Despite cratering prices and dwindling volumes, NFT marketplaces are continuing to improve their offerings in a bid to attract users.

Over the past week, Sudoswap launched its v2 iteration, Blur cracked down on wash traders and other airdrop spoofers, Kraken launched its NFT trading platform, and LooksRare unveiled a liquidity mining program.

The spate of updates comes despite top NFTs underperforming the broader crypto markets, with only 12 of the top 50 collections posting a gain against ETH over the past 90 days, according to NFT Price Floor.

But many in the ecosystem have faith that the heady highs of 2021 will one day return, with developers competing to ship new products and capture NFT market share in time for the next bull season.

Blur Cracks Down On Airdrop Spoofers

Blur, the leading NFT marketplace by volume, said on Wednesday that users engaged in wash trading or spoofing won’t be eligible for its second season of liquidity mining rewards.

Blur quickly rose to prominence after launching in February with an aggressive liquidity mining program that promised to reward users for shunning OpenSea, the formerly dominant marketplace.

However, some users are seeking to game the rules, and Blur will now exclude wallets found to be wash trading, spoofing bids with orders that cannot execute, or transferring NFTs to list on rival platforms from receiving BLUR rewards. Blur plans to distribute 300M BLUR tokens (worth $127M at current prices) during Season 2.

“Bidding Points have been updated to reward bidders who take real risk with the most points,” Blur said. “BLUR rewards will go to users who genuinely contribute to Blur's growth.”

Blur’s daily volume has trended between $10M and $20M since May.

Blur also launched Blend, an NFT lending protocol, last month. The protocol already represents more than 80% of NFT lending volume and is driving close to half of Blur's combined operations.

SudoSwap V2

On Thursday, Sudoswap, an automated market maker for NFTs, deployed its v2 iteration.

The upgrade introduces on-chain royalties, conditional orders, gas optimizations to reduce fees by up to 25%, and support for the ERC-1155 multi-token standard. Its new Creator Settings feature also allows creators to configure customizable royalties.

Sudoswap enjoyed explosive growth following its July 2022 launch, with daily volume tagging a record high of more than $3M in August, according to DappRadar. But volume has steadily receded since, with daily volume peaking at just $19,220 over the past 30 days.

Sudoswap is hoping to capture a dominant position within the nascent NFT DEX space, avoiding competing in the increasingly crowded marketplace space.

LooksRare Liquidity Rewards

Blur wasn’t the first NFT marketplace to try and dethrone OpenSea using liquidity mining rewards, with LooksRare briefly riding high as the top NFT platform by volume when it launched in January 2022.

The upstart platform processed hundreds of millions of dollars in daily volume throughout January and early February of last year, but activity has trended below $10M since May 2022.

LooksRare is now looking to stage a comeback, announcing its own rewards “season” on June 1. However, the campaign is unlikely to threaten Blur, with traders competing for roughly $385,000 worth of LOOKS tokens.

Kraken Launches NFT Marketplace

On June 8, Kraken, a top crypto exchange, opened its NFT marketplace to the public.

KrakenNFT currently features more than 250 collections, including support for Reddit’s collectible avatars. The platform offers zero-fee trading, supports a variety of cryptocurrencies and stablecoins, and also sports an integration with Polygon’s PoS side-chain.

KrakenNFT launched in beta in December 2022. Kraken processed $508M worth of cryptocurrency trades over the past 24 hours, according to CoinGecko.