The Defiant

NFT Marketplace Upstart Blur Leapfrogs OpenSea After Airdrop

OpenSea Waives Fees as Blur Handles $613M in Transaction Volume

By: Tarang Khaitan Loading...

NFT Marketplace Upstart Blur Leapfrogs OpenSea After Airdrop

It’s amazing what an airdrop can do.

Four months after its launch and a week after a major airdrop, Blur, the NFT marketplace, has overtaken industry giant OpenSea in terms of trading volume, according to data from DappRadar.

Rivalry

Blur handled $613M in NFT transactions over the last seven days compared to $108M at OpenSea, the DeFi research firm said. The rivalry appears to have triggered a price war as OpenSea temporarily waived its transaction fees to take on Blur, which doesn’t charge fees at the moment.

Blur also recorded a six-fold jump in Unique Active Wallets (UAW) during that period. OpenSea’s UAW increased 9%.

Active Participants

The surge comes after Blur launched its governance token, BLUR, in an airdrop to eligible users. The project, which is backed by web3 VC firm Paradigm, also released its Season 2, which aims to reward Blur’s active participants with BLUR tokens.

More than 94% of eligible users have claimed their BLUR tokens, according to a Dune Analytics dashboard.

OpenSea recently announced that it will strictly enforce a 0.5% minimum royalty on all collections that do not have on-chain royalty enforcement.

NFT Market Gets A Boost From $400M Blur Airdrop

NFT Market Gets A Boost From $400M Blur Airdrop

Trading Volumes On Paradigm-backed Marketplace Surpass OpenSea

The Defiant The Defiant

Further, OpenSea said that it will not block any marketplace which has the same policies, so Blur will not be blacklisted.

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Days earlier, Pacman, the Blur founder, asked creators to block OpenSea in a blog post.

Previously, creators that white-listed their collection on both Blur and OpenSea witnessed their royalty turn optional on the OpenSea platform.

Season 2 Rewards

In addition, Pacman also said that creators who block OpenSea would be eligible for Season 2 rewards.

Blur has adopted OpenSea developed Seaport protocol as a way to bypass OpenSea’s blacklist, and to enforce royalties.

On Feb.21, 0age, Head of Protocol Development at OpenSea, announced the latest version of Seaport. Seaport 1.4, remedies issues found in two previous iterations of the protocol.

Since its launch last week, the BLUR token has outperformed the broader market, as it gained nearly 67.3%, while ETH was up almost 11.3%, during the same period.

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