Blur’s incentives strategy propels it over OpenSea, causing Ethereum NFT transactions to surge to nearly $500 million in the previous week.
Ethereum NFT activity has more than doubled during the previous week, accelerating NFT trading after two consecutive months of sales growth. Blur, a new marketplace, has surpassed OpenSea as the market leader as a result of traders swiftly trading precious NFTs as if they were DeFi tokens, a phenomenon that is a result of the market’s evolution.
DappRadar reports that over the last week, Blur has increased Ethereum NFT trading volume by $460 million, or 361%. Meanwhile, OpenSea’s trade volume increased by 12%, reaching $107m. Just around $11 million was transacted on X2Y2, the third-place platform.
CryptoSlam reports an overall 155% weekly increase in trading volume for Ethereum NFTs. As part of preparations for its own debut last autumn, Blur airdropped its BLUR governance token to NFT traders who earned awards on the marketplace and also by trading elsewhere, which may explain the sudden increase in activity.
For a limited time, major NFT marketplace OpenSea will not charge a 2.5% sales fee and will reduce creator payouts in response to increased competition from upstart competitor Blur.
With its current price of $1.20 per token, the BLUR token has a market valuation of $466 million, and it would seem that at least some NFT collectors have re-invested the money they received as airdrops into purchasing further NFTs. And as the market data reveals, they predominantly use Blur to trade NFTs.
Nevertheless, it does not seem that the increase in trading activity at Blur is being driven largely by traders liquidating their BLUR token holdings in favour of purchasing and holding high-value NFTs. Instead, it seems that large holders of NFTs are trading them more often than ever before in an attempt to increase their chances of winning tokens in future rewards.
As an example, Otherside, an upcoming metaverse game developed by Yuga Labs, has been the most actively traded NFT project (market-wide) during the previous week. According to CryptoSlam, trading volume for NFT land plots increased by 318% week over week, reaching $63 million last week.
During that time period, the greatest seller was the wallet of the well-known pseudonymous NFT trader MachiBigBrother, who was engaged in approximately 1,300 Otherside NFT deals that generated sales of $4.3 million. This is just one example among the numerous examples that might be given to show the volume of his trading activity, both incoming and outgoing.
Blur’s innovative marketplace approach not only generally incentivizes excessive activity with the promise of token incentives, but also compensates traders for employing bidding pools that allow mass trading for NFTs.
