OpenSea’s V2 Beta Testers Accuse the Platform of Copying Blur

OpenSea, the leading non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace by sales, and the second largest by volume, is preparing for the public launch of its OpenSea 2.0. The platform is currently in its beta phase, and while some users are happy with the upgraded interface, others say the NFT giant is “too lazy to innovate.”

OpenSea announced its upcoming 2.0 launch in December, and has gradually rolled out access to eligible users and holders of the Gemesis NFT collection. The release came alongside the announcement of the OpenSea Foundation, which traders speculate is a decentralized entity that foreshadows a potential token release.

The protocol is still in its beta phase, and the team is actively tweaking the system interface prior to a public release. However, the similarities are difficult to ignore after beta testers say OpenSea included features that are associated with Blur, such as a trading-focused interface, a "loyalty score,” which penalized users for prioritizing other NFT platforms, just like Blur did, and awarding platform “XP” for bidding, akin to Blur’s points, incentivizing false demand.

The layout of the platform is also very similar to Blur’s, with points and loyalty scores. The trading interface prioritizes an activity graph and a chart, making the pictures of the NFTs smaller, while OpenSea’s current focus is on the NFTs’ art.

"Blur Clone"

One of the beta testers, an NFT analyst known as Stats, has been sharing updates to the OS2 beta on X, and on Jan. 27 he went as far as saying, “OpenSea is full-on cloning the Blur farming system. Loyalty scores, top 10 get 2.5x rewards, points for bidding but not buying etc. Can't tell if they weren't paying attention to what happened, are trolling us, or are just being too lazy to innovate and think this works based on Blur's outcome.”

Blur is a Paradigm-backed NFT marketplace that launched in 2022 and took the sector by storm. However, the protocol left some controversy in its wake.

Blur implemented a trading-focused interface that eliminated creator royalties, and incentivized bidding and listing on high-volume NFT collections. The result of Blur’s mechanisms ended up with thousands of NFTs in the hands of farmers who had no real intent to keep the NFTs, and were mainly preoccupied with selling them at any price in order to continue their farming loop.

Royalties Debate

The royalties debate carried on for months on end, while OpenSea began by putting its foot down to enforce creator royalties, the platform now offers an optional royalty for creators and artists with a 0.5% minimum, but maintains a mandatory 2.5% royalty fee that goes to OpenSea on most collections.

There was significant debate around Blur’s effect on the health of the NFT space during 2023, but its incentives began to dwindle after the underwhelming airdrop for the Blur team’s Layer 2, Blast.

Following the relief of these incentives, most “blue chip” NFTs such as Bored Ape Yacht Club, Pudgy Penguins, Cryptopunks, and Azuki surged marginally.

Anti-Farming Stance

The similar interface comes as a surprise given the OpenSea team and community’s strong stance against Blur’s farming and incentivization mechanisms. When news first came out about OS2 in November, OpenSea co-founder and CEO Devin Finzer reassured users on X that OS2 is “definitely not blur 2.0”.

Nadav Hollander, OpenSea’s CTO said in an interview the closed beta is not the end product.

Hollander said, “I think a lot of the criticism that the community had of how Blur conducted its rewards program had less to do with the actual form factor of the rewards for rewards program, and more to do with how these knobs were sort of calibrated in a highly asymmetric or highly inorganic manner.”

“If you’re going to create incentives in a market that is as relatively small as the

NFT market, you have to be incredibly thoughtful about how you actually calibrate those incentives, and you have to be incredibly careful to not be asymmetrical on either side of the market, whether that is incentivizing buy pressure too much or incentivizing sell pressure too much.” said Hollander, when speaking on bidding and behavioral incentives.

While Blur still maintains a 48% market share in terms of NFT volumes over the last 30 days, OpenSea commands a larger users base with 50% of total unique buyers compared to Blur’s 26%, and 45% of total sales compared to Blur’s 35% in the same amount of time.