Over the past 30 days, buzzworthy NFT marketplace Blur has handled over $816 million in Ethereum-based NFT trades, significantly eclipsing OpenSea’s $430 million, according to DappRadar.
The fledgling NFT marketplace has had rival OpenSea in its sights since October 2022, when Blur announced a zero-fee trading model.
But the issue of royalties is proving to be the biggest battle for the NFT marketplaces.
Blur does not force buyers to pay royalties prescribed by the creator, instead implementing an optional model of a minimum of 0.5%.
OpenSea, which usually enforces full royalties, has discouraged creators from listing on Blur by preventing collections from earning royalties if listed on both.
It does so by allowing creators to adjust their NFT smart contract codes to limit sales on any marketplace that does not enforce full royalty.
In response, Blur encourages all creators to avoid OpenSea for their own platform.
“Today, OpenSea automatically sets royalties to optional when they detect trades on Blur. We welcome OpenSea to stop this policy so that new collections can earn royalties everywhere,” Blur said in a February 15 blog post.
Blur’s strategy seems to have worked, if the numbers above are anything to go by.
In addition, OpenSea scrapped its enforcement policy last week and also set trading fees to 0% for a limited time.
We’re making some big changes today:
1) OpenSea fee → 0% for a limited period
2) Move to optional creator revenue (0.5% min) for all collections without on-chain enforcement (old and new)
3) Marketplaces with the same guidelines will not be blocked by the operator filter— OpenSea (@opensea) 17 February 2023
The debate about royalties is important for the NFT industry.
One of the basic principles behind the NFT movement is that creators should exercise freedom of action over their collections on the secondary market.
Any threat to this principle is sure to create controversy.
Another popular NFT marketplace called X2Y2 recently caused a stink among NFT creators after allowing buyers to opt out of paying royalties on the secondary market.
Blur NFTs: A Quick Background
Blur is an NFT marketplace for “pro-traders” (their words, not mine) backed by Web3 venture fund Paradigm.
All popular NFT collections including Bored Apes, Mutant Apes, Pudge Penguins and Doodle are traded on the platform
Blur has been live since July 2022, but largely went under the radar until interest picked up in recent months.
When the BLUR token dropped on February 14, active users soared to an all-time high of 57,000, individual transactions exceeded 77,000 and daily transaction volumes clocked in at more than $87 million.
In the following week, daily transaction volumes reached USD 100 million.
Blur’s trading activity skyrocketed as the BLUR token floated on February 14 – Source: DappRadar
The BLUR token has not fared well since launching on Valentine’s Day at $5. At the time of writing, the token had fallen nearly 80% to just over a dollar.
But it’s early days, and Blur has proven to take on industry champion OpenSea.
The winner may not be clear as day, but Blur have certainly made their mark.
