Original article: "Introducing the new entrant Blur: Another challenge to OpenSea"

Author: Maverick

Editor: Colin Wu

After receiving more than $14 million in financing from Paradigm and other institutions, Blur, an NFT trading market that claims to "provide services for professional traders", has been very popular recently. NFTScan data shows that as of December 16, Blur's NFT trading volume in the past month was second only to Opensea, accounting for about 29% of the entire NFT market share (as shown below), becoming the current NFT aggregation trading market with the largest transaction volume on the chain, giving OpenSea unprecedented pressure.

As an open airdrop, the official has previously stated that BLUR Token will be launched next year, but this is still based on the situation where the total amount, token distribution and other Tokenomics are not yet clear. The wool party is actually in a passive state with the risk of being reversed, but this has not affected the enthusiasm of the wool party. This enthusiasm may be related to the airdrop FOMO wave caused by the wealth effect of OP and APTOS, and the background of Opensea, the "unicorn" in the NFT market, delaying the issuance of tokens. "As long as there is a transaction record in NFT trading markets such as Opensea, LooksRare, and X2Y2 in the first 6 months, there is a chance to get the first airdrop BLUR", which appeared as a consolation prize and the new publicity form of airdrop "blind box" attracted the attention of the wool party. However, in the subsequent airdrop publicity, Blur twice brought out the rhetoric of "the next round will be bigger" PUA community. However, the anticipation of Blur's ongoing third round of airdrops and the official promotion on Twitter that "the third round, as the final round, has the largest reward scale" still promoted a surge in the number of Blur users. In particular, the big whales almost monopolized the rankings, and also briefly led to an increase in the transaction volume and floor price of a number of blue-chip NFT projects such as BAYC and Azuki.

Blur attracts traders through the "customized royalties + zero fees + airdrop expectations" model

Royalties have always been a sensitive topic in the NFT trading market. “Traders want to maximize profits, collectors want to support creators, and creators want to get more royalty income.” Because royalties cannot be enforced on multiple markets, the royalty settings on different platforms are different. Blur defaults to the highest royalty among OpenSea, LooksRare, and X2Y2. When traders list on Blur, they can customize the royalties of their listings. However, the zero royalties and customized royalties of SudoSwap and X2Y2, respectively, have already caused a lot of discussion in the market. The market believes that customized or zero royalties have caused the project party to lose some funds for continued development. Therefore, Blur hopes to encourage expected traders to use royalties through airdrop incentive expectations. In the second round of airdrops, the higher the user royalty setting of Blur, the higher the loyalty and the more airdrops it will get. For the user migration reward of Sudoswap, a zero-royalty platform, traders who pay royalties can make the same profit and get a larger airdrop than other methods by placing orders on Blur and setting the royalty to Sudoswap's platform fee (0.5%). However, according to data from NFTstatistics.eth, director of research at Proof, this expected encouragement did not actually prevent low or even zero royalty behavior. Blur's overall average royalty rate is only 0.65% (as shown below), and it has led to a decline in the overall NFT market royalty (as shown below).

Blur does not charge users fees like OpenSea, LooksRare and X2Y2. Traders do not need to pay anything to use Blur aggregator, trading market and other functions. Under the premise of customizing royalties, traders can directly obtain full income, but the current zero fee should be a short-term strategy to attract new users.

Blur's profit model has not yet been determined, and it currently relies solely on financing to support its development

As for how long the "customized royalties, zero fees" model will last, Blur officials said that they will wait until the Token is launched before voting through community governance to make decisions and discussions on specific royalties and fees. Before that, Blur will not make a penny. Regardless of the final plan, it is foreseeable that Blur will eventually fall into the "involution" dispute over royalties and fees that is commonly encountered in the NFT trading market. On the other hand, without a profit model and without income distribution, the value of BLUR Token is actually 0; if it exists only as a governance token, it not only does not meet the positioning of the platform token, but also faces the possibility of being imitated and defeated by other latecomers.

Matching the experience of professional trading, but not a moat

In terms of user experience, the official claims that Blur is 10 times faster than Gem, an aggregator acquired by OpenSea. In actual experience, Blur's speed and smoothness are indeed true, but when buying in bulk, it will cost more gas than other trading markets. Taking Element as an example, the gas costs of buying one NFT at a time and buying a batch of NFTs at a time are equal, while Blur consumes more gas the more NFTs it buys in bulk, which may be why Blur's bulk purchase of NFTs almost never fails.

In terms of UI/UX, Blur also matches the habits of professional traders. Taking BAYC as an example, in addition to displaying the price, listing time, and last selling price, the Blur homepage will also directly display the different NFT rarities. Users can directly select the rarity of the NFT (1%, 10%, 25%) or the price range to browse. The right side of the screen displays real-time NFT sales, purchases, and listing time information, and the lower right corner will display the price depth range of the project's NFT. When clicking on a specific NFT, Blur will display the specific features of the NFT, and display the last sale time, floor price, and transaction volume share of each feature for the relevant features, allowing traders to judge the rarity of the NFT by themselves.

Blur provides traders with professional tools, good UI/UX and other auxiliary functions, but it is important to realize that these auxiliary tools are not monopolistic and can be imitated. So far, Blur still does not have a deep enough "moat" to ensure that Blur will not be defeated by subsequent challengers. Under the brand effect of Opensea's first-mover advantage, it has formed a strong enough user stickiness. When ordinary users use the NFT trading market, they first consider the depth and liquidity of the transaction, and whether the transaction cost is low enough. As for whether the platform's functions are easy to use, they lag behind these two.

Overall, Blur has attracted market attention mainly due to the mid-term airdrop expectations. Whether it can form long-term user stickiness remains to be seen, especially after the airdrop is implemented, which will be the real test.

Reference articles:

https://mirror.xyz/blurdao.eth/2nba-2j0zHPrBX0iPSNGquZ9s_WotNH6B4e5usz85mM