The Defiant

Gem NFT Aggregator Rebrands As OpenSea Pro

OpenSea Courts Active Traders To Reclaim Market Share From Blur

By: Owen Fernau Loading...

Gem NFT Aggregator Rebrands As OpenSea Pro

OpenSea, the leading NFT marketplace by active users, has launched OpenSea Pro, an aggregator geared toward active traders, bringing together sale listings from 170 other NFT marketplaces onto one platform.

Users can sell NFTs on OpenSea Pro with no fees for a limited time. Trading fees on OpenSea’s regular marketplace, which the company slashed to zero in February, have been restored to 2.5% with the launch of Pro.

The launch comes at a time when Blur, a competing marketplace and aggregator, has been dominating the NFT trading space, continually eating away at OpenSea’s market share since its launch in October 2022.

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NFT Volume By Marketplace

While Blur has been averaging around three times OpenSea’s daily volume of roughly $35M, the upstart NFT platform has been taking its lumps — Blur encountered significant backlash to its move to extend its incentive program through May 1, which may drive some disgruntled traders back to OpenSea.

BLUR Farming

Blur is running a program which incentivizes bidding on NFTs with a future airdrop of BLUR tokens. This has led to inorganic trading, which hasn’t really been driven by collectors, or even traders trying to turn a profit outside of efforts to game Blur’s program. These airdrop-hungry bidders bend the NFT market around Blur’s incentives, distorting price discovery.

OpenSea Pro’s interface certainly has more in common with Blur than OpenSea’s marketplace — while the marketplace homepage heavily features art from NFT collections, OpenSea Pro shows a grid of the top NFT projects by trading volume, highlighting its focus on traders.

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OpenSea Pro Interface

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OpenSea Pro is an upgraded version of an aggregator called Gem, which OpenSea acquired in April last year.

Community Rewards

The OpenSea team also hinted at an upcoming rewards program for users of the Pro platform. Much to the ire of NFT traders, OpenSea has not airdropped any rewards to early users, while competitors like LooksRare and Blur have successfully attracted users with token rewards.

The team went on to say that the future rewards will feature NFTs, implying that a fungible token may not be the focus of any future airdrop.

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