Blur, an upstart NFT marketplace, has surpassed OpenSea in daily trading volume, generating over $500 million worth of Ethereum NFT trades over the past week.
This marks a significant milestone for Blur, which has quickly gained momentum with its rewards model. According to data analytics platform Nansen.ai, Blur’s daily trading volume was 6,602 ETH, while OpenSea’s was 5,649 ETH on Wednesday, Feb. 15.
Blur, founded in late 2021, has quickly made a name for itself as a zero-fee NFT marketplace that offers full royalties to creators. The platform also boasts a unique rewards model that incentivizes users to hold and stake the BLUR token, which in turn gives them access to exclusive NFT drops and discounts.
Blur’s weekly trading volume has increased by more than 300% in the past week alone, indicating that the platform is quickly gaining traction among NFT traders. Meanwhile, OpenSea’s weekly trading volume has only increased by 12%, suggesting that the platform is struggling to keep up with the competition.
Blur’s surge in daily trading volume followed a blog post from Blur recommending creators block NFT listings on OpenSea as a means of collecting full royalties on Blur’s zero-fee marketplace. The number of sales and wallets on OpenSea is still greater than on Blur.
Despite Blur’s recent surge in trading volume, OpenSea still maintains its position as the largest NFT marketplace by sales and wallets. However, Blur’s rapid ascent is causing concern among OpenSea’s executives and investors, who are now feeling the pressure to innovate and improve their platform in order to stay ahead of the competition.
With a spike in Ethereum NFT sales volume for the past couple of months, the NFT trade has seen a rapid acceleration in the past week. DappRadar data shows more than 9.5 million NFT sales during January, which is the largest recorded tally in nearly a year. The amount comes to about a 42% increase from December’s total of about 6.7 million NFTs sold.
The surge in volume has been registered to come soon after Blur went ahead and airdropped its BLUR governance token to the NFT traders who have earned rewards through the marketplace. The tokens have also been shared with traders who were trading elsewhere ahead of Blur’s own launch last fall.
The surge in volume has not only come from traders of BLUR tokens but also from whale traders who have significant NFT holdings. The whales appear to have been flipping their NFTs with even faster frequency than before, potentially giving a boost to the potential future token reward allocations.
According to Nansen, OpenSea has consistently had a higher trading volume per week than Blur by several multiples. In the most recent week, OpenSea’s weekly volume was 36,608 ETH, while Blur’s weekly volume was only 11,424 ETH.
As of last Wednesday, OpenSea and Blur were almost at par in terms of their sales and wallets. On that day, OpenSea recorded 19,908 sales, which was only 1.63 times higher than the total number of sales on Blur, which was 12,185.
When looking at the number of wallets active on the two marketplaces, an analogous trend arises: The number of wallets interacting with OpenSea is now only twice as great as those interacting with Blur, showing how the race between the first and second-largest marketplaces is tightening.
The NFT trade is gaining momentum, with traders rapidly flipping valuable NFTs, behavior similar to how they usually treat DeFi tokens. Upstart marketplace Blur has overtaken the biggest NFT marketplace OpenSea, but the latter still has a greater number of sales and wallets. Nevertheless, the trend suggests that the gap is closing, and it will be interesting to see how the market evolves over the coming weeks and months.
The rivalry between Blur and OpenSea is expected to intensify in the coming months, especially as the NFT market continues to gain traction. The total value of NFT sales in 2022 was $24.7 billion, up from just $41 million in 2018.
With the NFT market showing no signs of slowing down, Blur’s rise to become the top NFT marketplace is a clear indication of the increasing competition in the space. It will be interesting to see how the rivalry between Blur and OpenSea unfolds in the coming months and how other NFT marketplaces will try to compete in this rapidly growing market.
The NFT market is still in its early stages and is likely to see continued growth and innovation in the coming years. The competition between Blur and OpenSea is just one example of how the market is evolving and how new players are disrupting the status quo.
As the market continues to mature, we can expect to see new platforms emerge and existing platforms evolve to meet the needs of NFT traders and creators.