Blur eats OpenSea, but the battle for the NFT market is not over

Recent statistics show that in February there is a turning point in the NFT market. In more and more metrics, the Blur marketplace is leading the market. The former icon of the NFT market, the oldest marketplace, OpenSea, not wanting to lose the race to its young competitor, zeroed out commissions and began paying royalties to NFT authors.

 

Key takeaways

The NFT market has been growing rapidly since January 2023. If we look at the structure of this growth, according to Dune Analytics, the main driver of this growth is the new marketplace Blur. On the chart, you can see that it pulls the entire market (orange), while the market leader OpenSea (blue) barely grew at all.

The other chart below shows how gas usage for transfers on the Ethereum network has jumped, with 27% of that growth attributable to NFTs traded through Blur.

Finally, an even closer comparison between OpenSea and Blur shows that according to February data, Blur already leads in all market segments — except the number of users. This is the only advantage OpenSea still has from the old days. But if the current growth dynamics continue, Blur will overtake OpenSea in this metric this spring as well.

 

Public Conflict and the War of Commissions

The CEO of Blur, known in the community as Pacman, has publicly called OpenSea an “evil empire.” Pacman also insists that artists must receive royalties on all whitelisted marketplaces. Previously, OpenSea did not allow royalties anywhere. Pacman called it disrespectful to the NFT community and called for everyone to boycott OpenSea.

OpenSea responded rather calmly to the accusations, saying that Blur’s call to boycott OpenSea was wrong. Nevertheless, in addition to the response statement, some unexpected administrative decisions by OpenSea followed:

• Fees have been removed (no details yet as to how long this has been done).
• Royalties can now be paid, and they are now custom. A minimum of 0.5% of the transaction must be paid by the buyer to the author (more is possible if desired).

In their statement, OpenSea is quite frank about the reasons for the new rules:

“We began to see significant volume and users migrate to NFT marketplaces that do not fully enforce creator earnings. Today, that shift has accelerated dramatically despite our best efforts.

This is the start of a new era for Opensea. We’re excited to test this model,” the company said.

Who is Blur?

Blur is a new marketplace and aggregator for NFT trading that launched in the spring of 2022, in the middle of the crypto winter. Near the end of 2022, its popularity began to grow dramatically, and by February 2023, it was showing the best performance in the market, becoming a growth driver for the NFT market as a whole. This situation came as a surprise to many, as the market had long been dominated by the OpenSea marketplace, which in many ways represented NFT standards.

The features of Blur that set it apart from others are:

• Built as a DAO based on Ethereum, it has its own $BLUR token (embedded tokenomics).
• Blur itself positions itself as an “NFT marketplace for professional traders”. The marketplace has a clear focus; it provides advanced trading tools to become the best among a segment of investors and traders.
• Blur charges lower transaction fees than most other NFT trading platforms.
• Blur has a built-in wallet for NFT storage, which simplifies interaction on the technical side.
• Strong community: a strong community of digital artists, collectors, and crypto-enthusiasts has formed around the platform.

NFT marketplace Blur plans to become a unicorn company. This startup intends to close a funding round in 2023, increasing its estimated value to $1 billion.