Blur asks users to ban OpenSea

Yesterday, NFT Marketplace Blur finally allowed users to redeem care packages for $BLUR, the platform’s native token. The event was highly anticipated and resulted in a significant market increase in the last month. Ultimately, the optional royalty marketplace secured over $430 million in trading volume over the past 30 days.

And yesterday the money continued to flow. The event saw several top traders rake in more than $1 million worth of tokens. According to data from DappRadar, Blur’s 24-hour trading volume was around $9.5 million, making it second only to OpenSea, whose trading volume was approximately $12 million.

Now it looks like Blur are opening a new chapter in their books by taking on one of the titans of Web3 – OpenSea. In a blog post published this afternoon (February 15), the Blur team told users that they should block OpenSea’s NFT marketplace.

To understand this issue, you need to know that creators cannot currently earn full royalties on both Blur and OpenSea. Instead, they must choose one to earn full royalties from – OpenSea or Blur, but not both. This happens because OpenSea automatically sets royalties to optional when they detect trading on Blur.

Why? According to OpenSea, it protects both creators and their own bottom line.

In order for full creator fees to be enforced on OpenSea, the company requires individuals who created smart contracts after January 2, 2023 to take chain action to make royalties enforceable. Put simply, OpenSea requires creators to use on-chain tools that prevent the sale of NFTs on marketplaces that do not enforce royalties on creators. In particular, Blur is included in this category. As a result, users must block their NFTs from being sold on Blur in order to earn full royalties on OpenSea.

If an individual chooses not to do this, OpenSea automatically sets royalties to “optional” on these collections.

Blur takes issue with this attitude, arguing that creators should be the ones to decide where and how their goods are sold and not companies. “Our preference is for creators to be able to earn royalties on any marketplace they whitelist, rather than being forced to choose. To encourage this, Blur enforces full royalties on collections that block trading on OpenSea,” he wrote in the blog post.

The response to the post was swift. Many members of the Web3 community took to Twitter and began writing about a new era in the Wars of the Kings.