New NFT marketplace Blur has outpaced its established competitor and NFT giant Opensea in global market share.
Despite only launching in October, Blur has captured 46% of the weekly market share, compared to OpenSea’s 36%.
So far in February, Blur has topped daily trade volume in the NFT sector, averaging about $14.3 million, compared with OpenSea’s $11.3 million. This should come as no surprise as Blur has consistently exceeded OpenSea’s trade volumes since early December.
However, OpenSea still leads in terms of the number of trades conducted. Data shows that Blur has a smaller group of dedicated traders who process significant amounts, with 33,540 traders in the past week, compared to OpenSea’s 116,278.
How Blur has overtaken Opensea after just 3 months
Blur market share is outstripping Opensea daily trade volume, despite only launching in October. Opensea has been the dominant NFT marketplace since launching in 2017, so should the legacy marketplace be concerned?
Blur has a bit of an advantage on Opensea, as it’s not just a marketplace. Blur is also an aggregator, which allows its users to trade NFTs on multiple platforms via a single portal, including its own.
With Opensea, you can only trade locally within the platform, so all trade is 100% specific to Opensea. Therefore, although it’s behind in overall market share, the fact that Blur has overtaken it is somewhat misleading.
That said, any trade done on Blur’s aggregated platforms is not being done on Opensea, so it’s certainly losing revenue.
Blur upcoming Token Launch could be behind surge
As we announced last month, Blur delayed the launch of the BLUR token until 14 February. The third airdrop is ongoing, but with the imminent launch of the utility of the token could be the reasoning for this latest surge in market share.
Although the specific functions of the token are yet to be revealed, indications suggest it will have a role in governance, but with free tokens on offer, it’s clear NFT traders want some.
The airdrops are known as Care Packages and the first two airdrops, have been very successful. Anyone trading on the Blur marketplace received Airdrop 1, and whoever participated in Airdrop 2 received x10 tokens compared with the first airdrop.
The third airdrop is ongoing, which allows traders to earn reward points based on their NFT bidding activities. And with only a week to go until the actual launch, there’s clearly more interest.
What is Blur?
Blur is an NFT marketplace and aggregator, and the platform boasts some unique features, such as portfolio management with advanced analytics.
It’s powered by a team of engineers from Square, MIT, Brex, Five Rings, and YCombinator, and raised $11 million in funding last March.
They have been preparing for the token launch of its native token BLUR and after launching in October 2022, it has quickly gained plenty of market share.