On February 15th, the third round of Blur airdrops was released, and its tokens were officially launched on exchanges such as Okex, Huobi, Coinbase, Bitget and others.
Blur is an aggregated NFT trading platform for professional traders. It will be officially launched in October 2022. Compared with established NFT exchanges such as Opensea, its biggest feature is its fast transaction speed, almost ten times faster than it. Pending transactions on NFTs can be displayed in less than a second, and the list is updated every four seconds. This is undoubtedly very convenient for traders who professionally speculate on NFT. With this as a technical feature, coupled with excellent marketing methods, Blur has successfully become a rising star.
According to Dune Analytics data, as of February, Blur ranked among the top daily trading volumes in the entire NFT space, and in early January and most of December, Blur’s trading volume also surpassed OpenSea. In comparison with similar aggregating NFT exchanges, according to Dune Analytics data, Blur’s transaction volume in the past three months has exceeded 200 million US dollars, far exceeding similar NFT aggregators.
This time, Blur tokens are open for trading on the online exchange, and it has caused a sensation without announcing the token economic model. With such enthusiasm, what we need to discuss is, what will be the future of Blur, will it become the leader in NFT exchanges, and what is the value of its tokens?
How Did Blur Overtake Opensea in the Short Term?
In March 2022, Blur announced that it had raised more than $14 million in financing, led by Paradigm. The development team behind it is mostly developers from top projects. It is this strong capital and technical background that creates Blur’s simple and easy-to-use user experience.
Blur hits the market of professional traders. Opening its homepage, its interface design is different from other NFT trading platforms. It is different from other NFT trading platforms that display and sell NFTs in a large size, allowing people to carefully select Zhongyi’s NFT collections. On Blur’s interface, what kind of NFT image is very small, but it clearly puts multiple NFTs together, clearly showing its floor price, attributes, ranking, cost price, and price changes in recent days. Trading depth and more. This design is born for high-frequency trading needs.
Before blur was born, Opensea was the only one, and users were actually quite dissatisfied with it. Opensea once wanted an IPO but was rejected by the community. It made a lot of money from users, but it has not issued coins to give back to community users.
Going back to the user experience, users also have many complaints about Opensea. The gas fee on the platform is as high as 2.5%. It also often falls into security issues, crashes due to the surge in the number of visitors, and product development stagnates. In the eyes of users, it is still a web2 product.
NFT exchanges like X2Y2, which were launched later, have made some improvements to address 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 spoke out on this issue and said, “In the long run, Blur’s source of income ultimately depends on users’ transactions. As for the lack of transaction fees in the early stage, it is because Blur is currently in the stage of promoting to professional NFT Traders, and needs to have some advantages to seize the market.”
Launched together with the promotion method of the zero-fee money-burning model, there are also three rounds of generous airdrops. Shortly after obtaining financing, Blur told users that there would be a plan for airdropping Mingpai, on October 19th, while announcing that it would be officially launched the next day. BLur announced the first round of airdrop rules, Boxs cleverly introduced the blind box mechanism, and finally attracted 4881 wallets to participate in the activation, which is close to one-tenth of the number of wallets of Opensea. On the day of launch, the rules for the second round of airdrops were announced, and users are encouraged to place orders through Blur. Wallets that meet the requirements before November will receive a certain number of airdropped Boxes. At the same time, the introduction of a loyalty mechanism will compare the price of pending orders on other platforms, with the purpose of encouraging users to place real orders. On December 6th, Blur announced that at least one bid is required to receive the second round of airdrops. The third airdrop also requires users to bid to obtain airdrops. This will be the largest amount of Blur airdrops (about the second round of airdrops 1-2 times), and the third round of airdrops will be carried out at the same time as the tokens are listed on the exchange.
It was under the bombardment of these three rounds of airdrops that the number of users of Blur surged, and the subsequent two rounds of airdrops were based on the real trading situation of users, and also cultivated users’ real trading habits. This is also the reason why Blur’s transaction volume is much larger than that of Opensea since December, and it is precisely because it has driven the enthusiasm of the NFT market in the bear market, indirectly driving up the transaction volume and floor price of blue-chip NFT projects such as BAYC and Azuki.
Blur, on the other hand, has also made royalties optional, building its brand around community trust. Attracting NFT thought leaders, such as 6529, Zeneca, etc., these initiatives have helped Blur successfully seize the market.
According to Dune Analytics, Blur has topped the entire NFT space for daily trading volume every day through February. The average is about $14.3 million, compared with $11.3 million for OpenSea.
What Is the Future Potential of Blur?
The competition of NFT exchanges is fierce. According to the current classification of NFT exchanges, they can be roughly divided into three categories. One category is Opensea, X2Y2, Looksrare, and Magic Eden, which are called direct markets. And something like Sudoswap that enables users to buy and sell NFT from a liquidity pool instead of trading with other users is called an AMM NFT market. NFT marketplace aggregators, like Gem and Genie, allow users to easily purchase NFTs from various marketplaces through a single interface.
Each of these three types of exchanges has its own focus 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 still regard NFT as a number. Collection, a kind of identity or a symbol of the circle. Blur, which will appear in 2022, is not only a direct market, but also an aggregator. It bridges the gap between royalties, handling fees, etc. among various platforms. In fact, the biggest feature of Blur is that it serves professional traders. This is actually in line with the financialization trend of the NFT industry: NFT loans, derivatives, indices, and grading. Meets the needs of markets where NFTs are viewed as commodities or financial assets.
Its founder also made it clear when talking about future development, “At this stage, it is mainly focused on continuously enhancing the specialization of NFT transactions. When NFT transactions become more professional and more numerous, NFTFi will develop into an important sector. “
It can be predicted that Blur will be its governance token, but the official has not disclosed the maximum supply of tokens and token distribution details so far. According to the news from the community, Blur has been sold outside the market at a price of about 4U in recent days, but it is still unknown how Blur will perform when it goes online. After all, the market has fallen recently, and the United States will release January CPI data tonight.
As for Blur, it is still in the stage of burning money. When it no longer “collects money” in order to acquire customers, how many people are willing to use the platform? The officially announced rules for the third round of airdrops are “according to bid behavior”. We can check the data of DeFiLlama and find that in recent days, the funds in Blur’s Bid pool have begun to withdraw, and they have been in a state of decline all day before the release of the airdrop. . It can be seen that the behavior of swiping trading volume for airdrops is common. After the marketing heat is over, I wonder if Blur can maintain its current position in the NFT trading market?
