Blur overtakes OpenSea as #1 NFT trading platform
Over the past 30 days, NFT sales volume on prominent blockchains such as Ethereum, BNB Chain, and Flow have decreased by 14-41%. On other chains such as Solana, Polygon, Cardano and Arbitrum, however, the numbers have risen in the range of 11% to 64%.
That said, it should be noted that the increase in sales has not been matched by increases in the number of buyers and transactions in all cases. Thus, it can be said that even the NFT market is moving in step with the crypto market, as indecision continues to prevail.
Also, the bigger picture appears to be even darker. A recent tweet from the director of research at “PROOF” suggested that the banking crisis likely started a “structural shift” within the NFT arena. In fact, according to Sam, aka NFTStatistics,
“Since the SVB saga, unique NFT buyers per day have been about 25% lower than they were before. It feels a bit like a structural shift took place then.”
Reason for why, the research leader added,
“I think there’s just been less buying interest as prices have come down.”
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The NFT market battle
Over the past couple of months, Blur’s command of the NFT landscape has made things better. The same is depicted by the rising orange footprint in the diagram below. In fact, Blur is currently the top NFT trading platform by volume. According to Crypto Newsletter The Milky Way,
“Over the past four weeks, Blur has seen ~$1.1B worth of NFTs traded against Opensea’s ~$270M.“
In fact, even on the weekly time frame, OpenSea’s numbers are significantly less than Blur’s volume. Data from DappRadar revealed that $234.1 million worth of NFT transactions took place on Blur in the past seven days. In the same period, OpenSea made up only 80.75 million dollars in volume.
At this point, the role of BLUR air droplets cannot be ignored. During Season 1, users received around 360M BLUR. It was distributed when the BLUR token went public in February 2023. Additionally, Blur is set to release 300 million of its initial tokens to traders during the platform’s “Season 2,” which is already underway. The phase is expected to end in May 2023.
Now, to qualify for these airdrops, users must list and trade NFTs on Blur. In retrospect, this has caused high trading volumes, and according to Milk Road, the vast majority of it appears to be “wash trade.”
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