Blur surpassed OpenSea in daily NFT trading volume on Wednesday, Nansen shows

On Wednesday, February 15, non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace Blur overtook OpenSea in daily Ethereum trading volume, according to data analytics platform Nansen.ai.

Other data aggregators point to Blur’s steady rise over the past month. A Dune dashboard created by data scientist Hildebert Moulié shows Blur’s daily trading volume more than quadrupled following Blur’s release of a native token the previous day, a move that has helped push the competition between the two NFT marketplaces to a new level.

Trading volume on Blur’s marketplace was 6,602 ether (ETH) on Wednesday and OpenSea’s trading volume was 5,649 ETH, per Nansen. Meanwhile, another Dune dashboard created by sealaunch.xyz publishes higher daily trading volumes for both Blur and OpenSea – 30,410 ETH and 7,232 ETH respectively – showing a greater difference between the two marketplaces, compared to Nansen’s data.

Blur’s increase in daily trading volume also followed a blog post by Blur recommending creators block NFT listings on OpenSea as a means of collecting full royalties on Blur’s zero-fee marketplace. Currently, conflicting rules prevent artists from earning royalties on OpenSea and Blur at the same time.

OpenSea’s trading volume per week has always been several times higher than Blur’s trading volume, and in the last week OpenSea’s weekly volume was 36,608 ETH, while Blur’s weekly volume was 11,424 ETH, per Nansen.

Moulié’s Dune dashboard, on the other hand, indicates that Blur has led OpenSea in weekly trading volume since December 2022, except for one week in January 2023.

Another important metric to note is the number of sales and wallets on OpenSea is still greater than on Blur.

From February 7 to February 14, the number of sales on OpenSea was on average 8.37 times greater than the number of sales on Blur, while the number of wallets on OpenSea was approximately eight times greater than the number of wallets on Blur, per Nansen.

The gap between OpenSea and Blur in terms of sales and wallets has narrowed and was at its smallest on Wednesday. On that day, the number of sales on OpenSea was 19,908 – 1.63 times greater than Blur’s total number of sales, 12,185.

Looking at the number of wallets active in the two marketplaces, an analogous trend emerges: the number of wallets interacting with OpenSea is now only twice as large as those interacting with Blur, showing how the race between the first and second largest marketplaces is tightening to.

UPDATE (February 18, 2023 12:14 PM EST): Added references to additional data dashboards from Dune Analytics regarding the daily and weekly trading volume for Blur and OpenSea across the board.