How did Blur surpass Opensea in a short period of time? What is its future potential?

At 1 a.m. on February 15, Blur’s third round of airdrops were distributed, and its tokens were officially listed on exchanges such as Okex, Huobi, Coinbase, and Bitget.

Blur is an aggregated NFT trading platform for professional traders. It was officially launched in October 2022. Compared with the old NFT exchanges such as Opensea, its biggest feature is the fast transaction speed, which is almost ten times faster than that. It can display pending transactions on NFT in less than one second and update the list every four seconds. This is undoubtedly very convenient for professional NFT traders. With this technical feature and excellent marketing methods, Blur has successfully become a rising star.

According to Dune Analytics data, as of February, Blur has been at the top of the daily trading volume in the entire NFT field every day. In early January and most of December, Blur's trading volume also exceeded OpenSea. Compared with similar aggregated NFT exchanges, according to Dune Analytics data, Blur's trading volume in the past three months has exceeded US$200 million, far exceeding similar NFT aggregators.

The launch of Blur tokens on exchanges has caused a sensation even though its economic model has not been announced. Under such a heated discussion, what we need to discuss is what will be the future of Blur, whether it will become the leader in NFT exchanges, and what is the value of its tokens?

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

Blur has a strong foundation.

In March 2022, Blur announced that it had received more than $14 million in financing, led by Paradigm. The development team behind it is mostly developers from leading projects. It is this strong capital and technical background that has created Blur's simple and easy-to-use user experience.

Blur is targeting the market of professional traders. Opening its homepage, its interface design is different from other platforms. Unlike other NFT trading platforms that display NFTs on sale in large scale, allowing people to carefully select the NFT collections they like, Blur’s interface does not display the NFT image in a very small space. Instead, it clearly displays multiple NFTs together, clearly showing their floor price, attributes, ranking, cost price, price changes in recent dates, trading depth, etc. This design is born for high-frequency trading needs.

Before the birth of blur, Opensea was the only one in the market, and users were actually quite dissatisfied with it. Opensea once wanted to IPO but was opposed by the community and gave up. It made money from users with high fees, but it has not yet issued coins to give back to community users.

Back to the user experience, users also have many complaints about Opensea. The gas fee on its platform is high at 2.5%, and it often encounters security issues, crashes due to a surge in the number of visitors, and product development stagnation, etc. In the eyes of users, it is still a web2 product.

NFT exchanges like X2Y2, which were launched later, have made some improvements to their existing problems. Blur is no exception. In order to attract new users, Blur, which has been officially launched for five months, still has zero market fees. Its founder Pacman once said on this issue that "Blur's revenue source in the long run will ultimately rely on transaction fees collected from users. As for not charging transaction fees in the early stage, it is because Blur is currently in a stage of promotion to professional NFT Traders and needs some advantages to seize the market."

Along with the promotion method of zero-fee burning money model, there are three rounds of generous airdrops. Shortly after obtaining financing, Blur told users that there would be a plan for open airdrops. On October 19, it was announced that it would be officially launched the next day. Blur announced the rules for the first round of airdrops. Boxes cleverly introduced the blind box mechanism, which eventually attracted 4,881 wallets to participate in the activation, which is close to one-tenth of the number of wallets in Opensea. On the day of the launch, the rules for the second round of airdrops were announced, encouraging users to place orders through Blur. Wallets that meet the requirements before November will receive a certain number of airdrop Boxes. At the same time, the introduction of a loyalty mechanism will be compared with the order prices on other platforms, with the aim of encouraging users to place real orders. On December 6, Blur announced that at least one bid is required to receive the second round of airdrops. The third airdrop activity also requires users to bid to obtain airdrops. This will be the largest Blur airdrop (about 1-2 times the second round of airdrops), and the third round of airdrops will be launched at the same time as the token is listed on the exchange.

It was under the bombardment of these three rounds of airdrops that the number of Blur users surged, and the two subsequent rounds of airdrops were based on the users' real trading situations, which also cultivated users' real trading habits. This is also the reason why Blur's transaction volume has been much larger than Opensea since December. It is also because it has driven the popularity of the NFT market in the bear market, indirectly raising the transaction volume and floor price of a number of blue-chip NFT projects such as BAYC and Azuki.

On the other hand, Blur also made royalties optional and built its brand around community trust. Attracting NFT thought leaders such as 6529 and Zeneca helped Blur successfully seize the market.

According to Dune Analytics data, Blur has topped the daily trading volume in the entire NFT space every day so far in February, averaging about $14.3 million, while OpenSea is $11.3 million.

What is the future potential of Blur?

Competition in NFT exchanges is fierce. According to the current classification of NFT exchanges, they can be roughly divided into three categories. One is called a direct market, such as Opensea, X2Y2, Looksrare and Magic Eden. And similar to Sudoswap, which enables users to buy and sell NFTs from a liquidity pool instead of trading with other users, is called an AMM NFT market. And NFT market aggregators, such as Gem and Genie, which allow users to easily purchase NFTs from various markets through a single interface.

These three types of exchanges have their own focuses and advantages and disadvantages. The changes in NFT exchanges actually show a change in market demand and the development of NFT. Since the rise of Opensea in 2017, people have regarded NFT more as a digital collection, a symbol of identity or circle. Blur, which appeared in 2022, is not only a direct market, but also an aggregator. Apart from the gap between royalties, fees, etc. between platforms, Blur’s biggest feature is that it serves professional traders. This actually conforms to the trend of the NFT industry towards financialization: NFT loans, derivatives, indexes, and grading. It meets the needs of the market where NFT is regarded as a commodity or financial asset.

Its founder also made it clear when talking about future development that "at this stage, we are mainly focusing on continuously enhancing the professionalization of NFT transactions. When NFT transactions become more professional and more numerous, NFTFi will develop into an important sector."

It is predictable that Blur will be its governance token, but the official has not yet disclosed the maximum supply of tokens and the details of token distribution. According to the community, Blur has been sold at a price of around 4U in the past few days, and it is still unknown how Blur will perform when it goes online. After all, the market has fallen recently and the US will release the January CPI data tonight.

As for Blur, it is still in the stage of burning money. When it no longer "collects money" to acquire customers, how many people are willing to use the platform? The official rules for the third round of airdrops are "based on bid behavior". We can find out from the DeFiLlama data that in recent days, the funds in Blur's Bid pool have begun to withdraw, and they have been falling all day before the airdrop was released. This shows that the behavior of brushing transaction volume for airdrops is common. After the marketing heat is over, I wonder if Blur can still maintain its current position in the NFT trading market?