The development of blockchain technology has given rise to the birth of NFT. As the market matures, NFT trading platforms have also emerged. This article will rate and analyze five mainstream NFT trading platforms: Rarible, SuperRare, LooksRare, X2Y2 and Blur. We hope that through the ratings and analysis of these platforms, we can help readers choose the NFT trading platform that is best for them.

Quickly understand the project

Similar to OpenSea, Rarible, SuperRare, LooksRare, X2Y2, and Blur are all Ethereum-based NFT trading platforms that provide order book transactions for NFTs based on ERC-721 and ERC-1155 formats. But while they provide NFT transactions, they have different focuses.

Rarible

Rarible is one of the first NFT trading platforms established and was officially launched in April 2018. Rarible supports all types of NFT transactions, and Rarible charges a 2.5% handling fee for all transactions (OpenSea also charges a 2.5% handling fee for all transactions). In addition to Ethereum, Rarible has been deployed to smart contract platforms such as Solana, Polygon, and Immutable X. Rarible has also developed a set of open source NFT development tools called Rarible Protocol to support users in customizing NFTs.

SuperRare

SuperRare is mainly for the art sector. Started in 2020, SuperRare is committed to helping content creators obtain a fairer income through royalties. SuperRare charges a 15% handling fee for primary market transactions on the platform and a 3% handling fee for secondary market transactions.

LooksRare

LooksRare belongs to a newer generation of NFT trading platforms and was launched in January 2022. LooksRare hopes to challenge OpenSea’s dominance by distributing fees to the community. Specifically, LooksRare charges a 2% fee on all transactions and distributes these fee income to stakers of LooksRare’s native tokens.

X2Y2

X2Y2 was launched in February 2022. Similar to LooksRare, X2Y2 also distributes transaction fees to pledgers of native tokens, but X2Y2 only charges a 0.5% fee for NFT transactions.

Blur

Blur will be officially launched in October 2022. Compared with other NFT trading platforms that mainly focus on retail users, Blur focuses more on serving NFT traders. Specifically, Blur also provides batch submission and batch scanning based on the original order book NFT transactions. It also integrates NFTs on other NFT trading platforms for buyers to select and purchase. Additionally, the Blur platform does not charge any fees from transactions. (Related reading: What is Blur? For NFT traders - Ratings & Analysis)

Comparison of rating results

Underlying technology and security

Among these projects, except for Blur, the remaining projects have made their official code base public on GitHub. The public code includes project smart contracts, SDK, token contracts and other technology-related documents. In terms of code performance, Rarible has the highest number of Stars and Forks. The GitHub performance of X2Y2 and SuperRare is relatively poor, and the number of Stars and Forks is nearly 40 times lower than that of Rarible.

In terms of security audits, all projects publicly disclose security audit reports of their smart contracts. Among them, LooksRare has conducted the most audits, completing a total of 3 code audits in 2022. According to the report, SuperRare had the fewest security issues, with only one low-risk security issue in its project review code. LooksRare and Rarible have relatively many security vulnerabilities, and both have high-risk vulnerabilities in their code. In addition, except for X2Y2, all other projects have bug bounty programs.

Among these projects, except for Rarible, the remaining projects have not encountered any security crises so far. According to the news, OpenSea Rarible and OpenSea suffered a hacker attack on the NFT API in January 2022, with stolen assets worth approximately $1 million.

Token economy

In terms of token utility, according to publicly disclosed information, $LOOKS, $BLUR, $RARI, $X2Y2, and $RARE are all used for the decentralized governance of their respective projects. In addition, Rarible users can obtain sales fee reductions, Discrod private channel rights and other benefits by staking $RARI. Users of LooksRare and X2Y2 can obtain platform fee rewards by staking $LOOKS and $X2Y2 respectively. However, $BLUR and $RARE have no other additional functions except decentralized governance.

In terms of the token distribution plan, the shares allocated to the community by $LOOKS, $RARI, and $X2Y2 all account for more than 70%, and the degree of centralization is relatively low. The shares of $BLUR and $RARE allocated to the core team and investors are close to 50%, and the degree of centralization is relatively high.

In terms of the unlocking plan, the Rarible team did not disclose the detailed unlocking plan for $RARI. The unlocking plans of $LOOKS and $X2Y2 are similar. The shares belonging to the core team and investors will be fully unlocked within 2 years and unlocked every six months. The $RARE belonging to the core team and investors will be locked for 1 year and will be unlocked linearly in the subsequent 2 years. $BLUR will be unlocked in 4 years in a yearly decreasing manner, with 40% unlocked in the first year, 30% unlocked in the second year, and so on.

Token secondary market performance

According to statistics from TokenInsight, it can be seen that Blur, as a dark horse among the recent NFT trading platforms, has the best secondary market performance of its tokens among all projects. Although its token has just been launched for trading, less than 15 days ago, it is currently listed on 24 exchanges, and its 24-hour trading volume ranks first among all projects, approximately US$150 million.

According to historical data, $BLUR’s 24-hour trading volume reached a peak of approximately $440 million. This is almost rare among the new projects launched this year, and the performance is quite outstanding. Compared with other NFT trading platforms, as of February 27, 2023, the 24-hour trading volume of other project tokens did not exceed US$5 million. Although this is related to the relatively high market cap of $BLUR, the market cap of $BLUR is nearly 3 times different from $LOOKS and $RARE, and their 24h trading volume is nearly 30 times different.

On the other hand, both $X2Y2 and $RARI performed relatively poorly. They are currently listed on only 12 exchanges; $RARI has the lowest 24h trading volume of all projects, only $190,000.

Regarding price movements, based on the price comparison chart above, it is obvious that $BLUR has the most price volatility. In the early days of its launch, the price of $BLUR reached a peak of about $4, and then quickly fell back. But as the clamor in the market grew louder, the price of $Blur gradually increased in the following days to a maximum of around $1.4. But according to the latest data, on February 27, the price of $BLUR dropped back to around $0.84, a nearly 80% drop from ATH.

$RARE is similar to $RARI in that its price has been relatively stable. While $LOOKS and $X2Y2 are trending lower. Among them, the price of $X2Y2 has been on a downward trend since its launch, and its current price has dropped by nearly 60% compared to February 14.

Ecological development

According to statistics, NFT trading platforms will usher in a peak in transaction volume when they first go online, and Blur is no exception. Affected by airdrop incentives, NFT trading volume on Blur reached $70 million in the third week of launch, almost the same as OpenSea. After $BLUR was launched on February 14, 2023, Blur's weekly trading volume exceeded $360 million, which was 3 times the weekly trading volume of OpenSea that week. Affected by Blur, OpenSea announced the launch of limited-time 0-fee trading on February 18. As soon as this plan came out, Opensea's weekly trading volume jumped from US$100 million to US$330 million. However, Blur's trading volume did not decrease but increased to $530 million.

After LooksRare went online in January 2022, its weekly trading volume quickly surged to $2.9 billion, nearly 3 times the trading volume of OpenSea that week. X2Y2 came online after a significant drop in LooksRare trading volume, with weekly trading volume rising from a peak of $48 million in the first week of April to nearly $200 million in the first week of June, which was the same as OpenSea's trading volume that week. However, as wash traders left the market, both LooksRare and X2Y2 saw significant declines in trading volume. In the last week of 2022, OpenSea’s weekly trading volume was US$72 million, and the weekly trading volumes of LooksRare and X2Y2 were US$27 million and US$40 million respectively. These data are more reflective of real-world usage of LooksRare and X2Y2.

With the experience of LooksRare and X2Y2, we wanted to know more about the real usage of each NFT trading platform, so we chose the number of independent buyers for comparison. It was found that the growth in transaction volume on LooksRare has almost nothing to do with the number of unique buyers. Since the launch of LooksRare, the number of weekly active buyers has remained in the range of 2,000-6,000. While not exactly a positive correlation, X2Y2 and Blur’s transaction volume growth is almost always accompanied by user growth.

For example, Blur’s weekly trading volume grew approximately 40x from $10 million when it launched to $400 million in the second week of February 2023. Blur’s weekly active buyers grew from 6k to 30k during the same time period, an increase of ~5x. In the latest week, Blur’s trading volume rose from $400 million in the previous week to $650 million, an increase of more than 50%, but the number of buyers only increased by less than 10%.

In terms of community performance, according to statistics from TokenInsight, as of February 27, 2023, Rarible has the largest number of Twitter fans, nearly 500,000. And Blur has the most Discord followers, nearly 130,000. SuperRare operates the largest number of social media platforms. In addition to Twitter and Discord, it also operates Telegram, Medium, Intagram, Reddit, etc.

Based on product usage and community performance, Blur performed best. Blur currently has the largest trading volume and the largest number of independent buyers except OpenSea, so we believe that Blur's current high trading volume will not cause a sharp decline similar to LooksRare. At the same time, Blur’s community is also quite active. In addition to its advantage in terms of numbers, community activities such as AMA and Space are also held relatively frequently.

write at the end

To sum up, we believe that among the mainstream NFT trading platforms mentioned in this article, Blur and LooksRare perform better. Among them, LooksRare, as a new generation NFT trading platform, became famous when it was first launched in early 2022. It once had extremely high transaction volume comparable to OpenSea. Unfortunately, these are caused by trading incentives. Unfortunately, the products and services that are homogeneous with OpenSea have not brought the same user stickiness to LooksRare as OpenSea. In addition, LooksRare’s own transaction fees are not as attractive as X2Y2. Today, the transaction volume and liquidity of NFT on LooksRare are both low. Showing a declining trend. As a result, we believe LooksRare's rating will drop to B or even lower in the future.

Blur adopts a differentiation strategy to provide users with products and services that are different from OpenSea, and has attracted many NFT traders since its launch. Currently, Blur is in its growth phase and has surpassed OpenSea in transaction volume. We believe that Blur’s trading volume also includes wash trading, but it is more sustainable than LooksRare’s. Over time, speculators will find better trading opportunities and leave Blur, and Blur will show us more realistic usage. At the same time, with the further development of Blur, richer token application scenarios, more detailed token unlocking plans, and a more complete roadmap will further improve Blur's rating. In the future, we will continue to pay attention to the development of the NFT trading platform and make timely adjustments and updates to the rating results.

Read the full article here: https://tokeninsight.com/en/research/market-analysis/comparison-of-major-nft-marketplaces-blur-looksrare-x2y2-rarible-and-superrare-ratings-analysis

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