[Feature] How did Blur Token surpass OpenSea in a short period of time? What is its future potential?

At 1 a.m. on February 15th, the third round of Blur airdrop was distributed, and its token was officially listed on exchanges such as OKX, Huobi, Coinbase, Bitget, etc.

Blur is an aggregated NFT trading platform for professional traders, which was launched in October 2022. Its biggest feature compared to traditional NFT exchanges like OpenSea is its fast transaction speed, which is almost ten times faster, displaying pending transactions on NFT in less than one second and updating the list every four seconds. This is undoubtedly very convenient for professional NFT traders. With this technological advantage and excellent marketing strategies, Blur has successfully become a rising star.

According to Dune Analytics data, as of February, Blur ranked among the top in daily trading volume in the entire NFT field. For most of December and early January, its trading volume surpassed OpenSea. Compared with similar aggregated NFT trading platforms, Dune Analytics data shows that Blur's trading volume has exceeded $200 million in the past three months, far surpassing similar NFT aggregators.

The listing of Blur tokens on exchanges has caused a sensation even without revealing its token economic model. With such popularity, we need to explore what the future of Blur will be, whether it will become a leader in NFT exchanges, and what is the true value of its tokens.

How did Blur surpass Opensea in a short period of time?

Blur has a strong foundation.

In March 2022, Blur announced it raised more than $14 million with Paradigm as the lead investor. The development team behind Blur consists mostly of experienced developers from other leading projects. It is this strong capital and technological background that has created the sleek and user-friendly experience of Blur.

Blur targets the market of professional traders. Its interface design is different from others. Unlike other NFT trading platforms that prominently display NFTs for sale, allowing people to carefully select one as a collectible, Blur's interface displays NFT images in a small size, but clearly presents multiple NFTs together, showing their floor price, attributes, ranking, cost price, recent price changes, trading depth, and more. This design is created for high-frequency trading needs.

Before the birth of Blur, Opensea was the dominant player and users were actually quite dissatisfied with it. Opensea once wanted to go for IPO but was opposed by the community and had to abandon the plan. It earned high fees from users, but has yet to issue coins to give back to the community.

In terms of user experience, there are also many complaints about Opensea. The gas fee on its platform is relatively high at 2.5%, and it often faces security issues, crashes due to a surge in visitors, and stagnant product development, among other things. In the eyes of users, it is still a web2 product.

Similar to X2Y2 and other NFT exchanges that came online later, they have made some improvements to address the issues they face. Blur is no exception. In order to attract new users, Blur, which has been officially launched for five months, still has zero market transaction fees. Founder Pacman once spoke out on this issue, saying "Blur's long-term income source will ultimately depend on the transaction fees charged when users trade. As for not charging transaction fees in the early stages, it is because Blur is currently in a stage of promoting to professional NFT traders and needs some advantages to seize the market."

Accompanying the zero transaction fee promotion, there were also three rounds of generous airdrops. Shortly after obtaining financing, Blur announced to users that there would be a plan for airdrops. On October 19th, the day before the official launch, Blur released the rules for the first round of airdrops. Blur cleverly introduced the mystery box mechanism and ultimately attracted 4881 wallets to participate in activation, which is close to one-tenth of Opensea's wallet count. On the day of launch, the rules for the second round of airdrops were announced, which encouraged users to place orders through Blur. Wallets that met the requirements before November would receive a certain number of Blur’s airdrops. At the same time, a loyalty mechanism was introduced to compare hanging orders with other platforms to encourage users to place real orders. On December 6th, Blur announced that receiving the second round of airdrops requires at least one bid, and the third airdrop event also requires users to obtain airdrops through bid behavior, which will be the largest Blur airdrop (approximately 1-2 times that of the second round of airdrops), and the third round of airdrops will be launched simultaneously with the token listing on the exchange.

With these three rounds of airdrops, Blur's user base surged, and the latter two rounds of airdrops were based on users' actual trading behavior, which also fostered users' real trading habits. This is also why Blur's trading volume in December was much higher than that of Opensea, and it indirectly boosted the trading volume and floor prices of many blue-chip NFT projects such as BAYC and Azuki.

On the other hand, Blur also made royalty optional, built its brand around community trust, and attracted NFT thought leaders such as 6529 and Zeneca, all of which helped Blur successfully capture the market.

According to Dune Analytics data, as of February, Blur is at the forefront of daily transaction volume in the entire NFT field, averaging about $14.3 million, while OpenSea is at $11.3 million.

What is Blur’s future potential?

The competition among NFT exchanges is fierce. According to the current classification of NFT exchanges, they can be roughly divided into three categories. One category is the direct market, represented by Opensea, X2Y2, Looksrare, and Magic Eden. The second category, known as the AMM NFT market, includes exchanges like Sudoswap, which enables users to buy and sell NFTs from liquidity pools rather than from other users. The third category is the NFT market aggregator, which includes platforms like Gem and Genie that allow users to easily buy NFTs from various markets through a single interface.

Each of these three types of exchanges has its own focus and advantages and disadvantages. The evolution of NFT exchanges actually reflects a change in market demand and NFT development. When Opensea emerged in 2017, people mostly regarded NFTs as digital collectibles, a symbol of identity or a certain community. Blur, which appeared in 2022, is not only a direct market, but also an aggregator that removes the differences between platforms in terms of royalties, fees, and so on. The biggest feature of Blur is actually its service for professional traders. This is in line with the trend of NFT industry towards financialization: NFT loans, derivatives, indices, grades, etc., which meet the market demand for NFTs to be viewed as commodities or financial assets.

When discussing future development, its founder also clearly stated that "at this stage, the focus is mainly on continuously enhancing the professionalism of NFT trading. Only when NFT trading becomes more professional and there are more of them, will NFTFi develop into an important segment."

It can be predicted that Blur will be its governance token, but the official has not yet revealed the maximum token supply and token distribution details. According to information from the community, Blur has recently been sold off-exchange at a price of around 4U, and it is still unknown how Blur will perform when it is listed, especially considering the recent market downturn and the release of US CPI data for January tonight.

As for Blur, it is currently in the stage of burning money. After it stops "burning money" to acquire customers, how many people will still be willing to use the platform? The rules for the third round of official airdrops are "based on bid behavior". According to DeFiLlama data, the funds in Blur's Bid pool have started to withdraw in the past few days, and it has been declining all day today before the airdrop was released. This indicates that there is a common behavior of inflating trading volume for airdrops. After the marketing hype is over, it is unknown whether Blur can still maintain its current position in the NFT trading market.

Source: Jessy, Jinse journalist