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Blur is on a roll, NFT platform leader OpenSea is on edge?

2023-02-15 14:09

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原文标题：《黑马 Blur「狂飙」，NFT 平台老大 OpenSea 要坐不住了？》

原文作者：大圣 web3，白话区块链

On February 15th, at 1:00 am, the long-awaited Blur Token went online and the project opened Care Packages (blind box) to eligible participants to apply. The third round of airdrop started, which once again triggered a market frenzy.

Since its official launch in October, Blur has been a shining star in the bear market. What exactly is Blur?

Blur is an NFT marketplace and aggregator designed for professional buyers and sellers with many innovative features. The official definition of itself is "a combination of a real-time NFT marketplace and aggregator" that supports bulk buying and selling of NFT and takes zero royalty (Opensea takes a 5% cut).

NFT is another heavyweight application of blockchain. After the outbreak of NFT in 2021, investment institutions, project parties or creators, brand parties and artists in the traditional world have been making efforts in this sector. As a result, many NFT projects whose market value has increased one hundred and one thousand times have been produced. What's more, Opensea, which originally had only 5 members, shines brilliantly, with an estimated value of $13 billion in the first half of 2022, monopolizing the NFT market for a long time.

Apparently it's a very lucrative track. Since then, several platforms have emerged, but none have been able to challenge Opensea's dominance.

In May last year, after the release of Otherdeed and the bursting of the market FOMO, the NFT market, like the crypto market, entered a long-term bear market. The volume plummeted, and the average daily value was only 15% of the bull market. However, Blur bucked the trend of growth in the overall downturn of the NFT market.

How did Blur rise to the top?

In March 2022, the NFT market was still hot, but Blur was still in the early stages of development. Blur has announced an $11 million seed round of funding led by Paradigm, with participation from eGirl Capital, 0xMaki and LedgerStatus.

With Paradigm as the top crypto investor, Blur's halo has made its debut and caught the market's attention. Blur's team is equally luxurious, made up of developers from MIT, Five Rings Capital, Twitch, Blurrex, Square, and more.

In May, NFT marketplace Blur launched a test version. Blur allows users to view the sales of NFTS in existing markets in real time without having to manually refresh them. The test version allows users to remove all of their NFTS in batches.

In October, after four months of private beta, Blur launched the NFT Marketplace, offering airdrop to users who have bought and sold NFT in the last six months. Token Blur.

Within a week of its launch, Blur's sales volume doubled from about $6.6 million to $13.8 million compared to the test site. After that, Blur's sales volume, unique users, and market share of the number of sales all skyrocketed.

In early November, the daily trading volume exceeded looksrare, x2y2 and other mainstream markets, ranking second;

On November 27, Blur surpassed Opensea in terms of daily sales volume by 5.5K ETH (Blur) and 5.3K ETH (Opensea), which continued for a while and then fell off. In the last three months, Blur's total ETH sales volume was close to 800k eth. The transaction volume exceeds Opensea 748k eth. It is currently the second largest NFT market after Opensea.

The bright spot in Blur

Excellent products, fast trading, in line with market demand

In the downturn of the NFT market in the second half of 2022, ill poop it NFT, ShitBeast and other "poop" combination projects were popular, the meme wind blew into the nft circle, and the situation of bad money driving out good money in the market intensified, reflecting users' mockery and despair of the market at that time. Then emerge in an endless stream of NFT projects began to frequently break, return to zero. In this market context, users have an urgent demand for fast buying and selling, and aggregators begin to occupy the market quickly.

The "shit" combination

Blur has honed its product with aggregators, which serve as its extensive traffic entry point. The official announcement is that buying and selling NFT on Blur is 10 times faster than header aggregators such as Gem. In fact, the user experience is smooth and silky, showing pending trades on the NFT in less than 1 second, which solves the chronic problem of slow buying and selling response.

Blur website

As shown in Blur's buying and selling interface, Blur is a very practical product for users with certain NFT buying and selling experience. The interface clearly lists the key points of user concern, with complete functions and strong professionalism.

Users can select rarity and price range separately, quickly find the NFT they want to buy and buy in bulk. All NFT series have a floor price depth analysis chart, intuitively understand the historical price and order situation, providing users with a very convenient integration tool for trading NFT.

Custom royalty, 0 handling fee

Royalties and commissions are two important costs for users, especially in the bear market moneymaking effect is not good, users are more reluctant to bear. So other emerging trading platforms are also working hard in this area.

In terms of royalties, Blur adopted a custom royalty approach to give users more choice. At the same time, in order to encourage users to pay royalties, Blur offered airdrop incentives to users who paid high rates of royalties. The final results showed that this behavior partially increased Blur's overall royalty rate.

The figures show an average tax rate of around 0.65%, higher than X2Y2 and looksrare, but well below Opensea6%. Lower royalties are friendly to users.

Since the launch of Blur, users have not been charged fees. Users can enjoy high-quality Blur services for free, which is the reason for the high loyalty of Blur users.

Successful marketing strategy

In contrast to Opensea's hesitancy in issuing tokens and less interaction with the community, Blur captured the hearts of the Web3 community right from the launch. In the test network stage, it attracted a large number of fans in a short time by recommending a waiting list. Users need to invite 5 people to participate in order to obtain access.

After the official launch of the project, for different types of users, the total plan to carry out three airdrop, and each airdrop scale will be larger than the last, hanging the appetite of users. The details of the Triple airdrop are as follows:

First airdrop:

Starting in October, users have 14 days to launch an NFT on Blur's platform, and anyone with a record of buying and selling an NFT within the last six months can participate.

Round 2 airdrop:

Launched on December 5th and ending on January 3rd, it is ten times bigger than the first;

The second round of airdrop offers airdrop packages to all participants who actively participate in placing orders and transactions on the platform.

Third airdrop:

Launching on February 14, Blur officially announced that this third airdrop will be Blur's last and largest airdrop ever.

Each time Blur adds to its airdrop scale, it raises expectations.

It's also been in the last three months that Blur's sales and users have grown rapidly,

Can Blur win the battle between Blur and Opensea?

Blacklist event

In November 2022, Opensea boycotted Blur by requiring new NFT favorites to block Blur and enforcing royalties, which most creators chose to pay to Opensea. This results in NFT collectibles that impose royalties on Opensea not being able to be bought and sold on Blur.

Blur then attempted to reconcile with Opensea in order to remove the restrictions of the blacklist, but was rejected.

On February 1, 2023, Blur created a new NFT transaction system that bypassed Opensea's blacklist controls by leveraging Opensea's Seaport. Since Seaport was not on Opensea's blacklist, the NFT project that led to Blur being blocked can now be traded through the new system, and Blur has finally skillfully circumvented Opensea's blacklist controls, with profound consequences for all concerned, Including Blur, Creators, Sellers and Opensea.

With Opensea and Blur taking very different approaches to royalties, their business overlaps and competition heats up. Although Blur said that its daily sales volume exceeded Opensea for many days recently, there was still a big gap between Opensea and Opensea in terms of number of users. The same data in the last three months showed that OpenSea had 636k users while Blur had only 187k users.

In addition, Blur's sales volume in the last three months has been achieved despite the continued incentive of airdrop, as well as forgoing fee income and the controversy over royalties. Once airdrop is landed, whether the volume of subsequent sales can maintain growth again is the key to measure user loyalty and product.

In terms of profit, since Blur does not charge fees and has no other sources of profit, the progress of the project all depends on investors' funds. Therefore, a stable profit model needs to be determined later to ensure the sustainable development of the project. Otherwise, the issued tokens may become a cash machine for project parties and investment institutions.

On the product side, Opensea acquired Gem last year and was the largest aggregator before Blur. Under pressure from Blur, Opensea is also trying to improve the user experience. With a more loyal audience and several years in the market, Blur needs to maintain its core of differentiation. In addition, in terms of security, as a new NFT market, Blur has not yet experienced the market experience.

Overall, Blur still has some distance to go before it can truly surpass Opensea, and faces challenges in many ways. But the pressure on Opensea has never been greater, and with the support of its star power and team, Blur may yet achieve new glory

Compare with other major platforms

In addition, compared to the top six NFT trading platforms in the last three months, Blur is number one in terms of purchase and sale ratio, which is relatively less of a threat compared to platforms other than OpenSea.