The Blur airdrop reproduces the wealth effect. This article explains in detail the beginning and end of the Blur airdrop and the token economic model.

The Blur airdrop that the entire network has been waiting for finally came to an end in the early morning of February 15, 2023, Beijing time, with 360 million Blur tokens given back to the NFT community and Blur users. According to feedback from the community and social media, there are not a few people who have received hundreds of thousands of Blur tokens in the airdrop. Even users who do not use Blur products heavily for the purpose of Blur airdrop have received thousands to tens of thousands of dollars, and again An unprecedented airdrop wealth effect.
Dune Analytics data shows that as of 13:00 on February 15, 80.15% of the Blur airdrop has been claimed. Among them, 35.8% of the airdrop quantities are between 100 and 1,000. 39.6% of the addresses received airdrops between 1,000 and 10,000, and 7.8% received airdrops between 10,000 and 100,000. The top three wallets currently claiming airdrops received airdrops of 3.2 million BLUR ($2.46 million), 2.97 million BLUR ($2.28 million), and 2.5 million BLUR ($1.92 million) respectively.
According to Blur's official website, this airdrop is for all trading users, care package holders and creators from October 19, 2022 to February 14, 2023. In addition, users who join its waiting list or participate in the private beta in May 2022 will automatically receive additional airdrop allocations from Blur. The airdrop will be available for 60 days, and users who do not claim it by then will miss it.
In addition, this airdrop is only the first round of airdrops issued by Blur to the community. The second round of airdrops has already begun. From now until March 14, users who bid for collections and list NFTs on the Blur platform will receive double points. Therefore, users who missed the first round of Blur airdrops can now participate in its second round of airdrops. In this article, PANews will explain in detail the launch of Blur's first round of airdrops, as well as its economic model, governance, market value, etc.
Blur's first round of airdrops
Long before the Blur airdrop was issued, several centralized exchanges such as Coinbase, OKX, and Huobi had already released announcements about the launch, which filled the market with expectations. Currently, among the mainstream exchanges, only Binance has not released an announcement about the launch. At the same time, community users also actively dug deep into the Blur token contract address and found the official contract before the launch. According to Etherscan browser data, the multi-signature wallet address of cryptocurrency market maker Wintermute received 15 million Blur tokens before the Blur airdrop was launched. Therefore, the community speculated that Blur officials would hand over the market making business to Wintermute.
Blur's official airdrop of Blur tokens, which was originally scheduled to be launched at 1:00 a.m. on February 15, was postponed to 2:30 a.m. for some reason. After the official launch, the price of Blur tokens on the centralized exchange OKX surged from $0.1 to $8.3, and the price on Huobi surged from $4 to $10. And because of the overload of users, the page for claiming the airdrop on the Blur official website crashed for a while, and users were unable to open the airdrop claiming interface and claim it normally. It was not available until more than half an hour after the launch time.
As a result, Ethereum network gas fees soared to around 1,000 Gwei. According to the ultrasound website, in the past 24 hours, the contract that received the Blur airdrop burned 980 ETH, ranking first in the entire network.
According to Blur's official information, as of the time of airdrop collection, a total of 146,823 users used Blur to trade NFTs, and the Blur protocol has processed more than US$1.18 billion in GMV since its launch, excluding false transactions.
Economic Model
According to Blur's official documents, BLUR tokens are issued by the foundation and are utility tokens. BLUR tokens give the community control over the DAO. Token holders can manage the key parameters of value accumulation and distribution in the Blur protocol by voting themselves or by proxy. The total number of BLUR tokens issued is 3 billion, which will be released in 4-5 years. 51% of them are allocated to Blur community members; 29% are allocated to past and future core contributors, with a release period of 4 years; 19% are allocated to investors, with a release period of 4 years; 1% are allocated to advisory members, with a release period of 4 years.
BLUR tokens allocated to core contributors and launch partners will vest on the same schedule with an added 4-month cliff. Advisors' BLUR allocations will vest in 48 to 60 months with a 4 to 16-month cliff. The release rate is 40% of the total supply in the first year, 30% in the second year, 20% in the third year, and 10% in the fourth year.
12% of BLUR tokens were distributed to the community in the first round of airdrops, and another 39% of BLUR tokens were distributed to the community through contributor grants, community initiatives, and incentive programs. Of this 39%, 10% has been allocated to the incentive budget for the next release of incentives. If all the incentive budget is used up, more incentive budget will be available for allocation through voting.
In addition, Blur will launch a proposal for an agreement rate (up to 2.5%) after 180 days, and the community will then decide on the agreement rate.
It can be seen that the BLUR token economic model tends to guide platform liquidity through continuous incentives, avoiding the attenuation of platform liquidity after the one-time release of incentives. Through multiple and multi-stage incentives, users can develop long-term usage habits and enhance platform stickiness and influence. Defillama data shows that before the first round of airdrops, users thought that Blur would only be airdropped in this round, and some users proposed ETH from the Blur Bid bid pool. After the official launch of the airdrop and the announcement that the second round of airdrops will begin immediately, there has been a significant inflow of ETH in the Blur Bid bidding pool. The current equivalent value of the pool is US$40 million.
In addition, the largest number of BLUR tokens are distributed to the community, which is in line with the Blur Foundation's philosophy of operating with a DAO control protocol. To a certain extent, it avoids the centralized governance of some projects that are called DAOs but actually have the majority of voting rights. It also increases the vesting period and cliff time of tokens allocated to core contributors and consultants to benefit community members.
Governance
BLUR token holders have the right to govern the protocol. The Blur Foundation helps promote community-led governance and participation in the DAO, and assists contributors in developing and growing the Blur ecosystem. To this end, Zeneca was promoted to the director of the Blur Foundation, and Blur core protocol contributors also joined the foundation. At the same time, Blur officials have mentioned governance and incentives many times, which shows their emphasis on governance.
The governance process is divided into off-chain proposals, forum discussions, snapshot voting, on-chain proposals, and execution. Governance proposals can be specifically divided into core, process, and information categories. Core proposals require on-chain actions, including financial allocations, etc. This category will set proposal thresholds, lock governance rights, etc. Process proposals are proposals to change processes or implementations, including changes to procedures, guidelines, decision-making processes, and changes to Blur DAO's tools, etc. Information proposals are suggestions for the community to provide general guidelines or information.
Users need to be entrusted with a minimum number of BLUR tokens (currently 100,000) to initiate off-chain proposals, and proposals require at least 30 million BLUR votes to enter the on-chain execution vote. After entering the on-chain execution vote, at least 120 million BLUR votes can be executed.
According to Blur governance information, user governance rights are proportional to the number of coins held, which to some extent increases the motivation of users to hold coins, but governance itself is still in a situation that is easily controlled by centralized authorities. Because most coin holders do not care about governance rights and prefer to entrust them to governance representatives, in the end, a small number of representatives may control more governance rights.
To streamline the on-chain governance process, Blur DAO will have some of its operations managed by committees. Over time, these committees will work to gradually transfer their functions to management. Specifically, there are the Security Committee, the Market Committee, and the Incentive Committee. The Security Committee ensures that proposals follow the prescribed governance procedures and prevents proposals that do not follow proper procedures from being passed; the Market Committee promotes upgrades to the Blur market and aggregator contracts, and implements governance decisions around community development, such as royalties. The Incentive Committee is tasked with managing incentives for Blur users. The Incentive Committee can use up to 10% of the total supply for incentive programs.
Such flexible governance makes up for the overly rigid governance process, and can be more thoughtful in the process of community and product updates. For example, the Blur platform's royalties are set as buyer-defined royalties, which may prevent high-quality creators from receiving corresponding returns. However, the existence of the committee can incentivize the maintenance of high-quality creators.
Market value comparison between Blur and NFT trading platforms
According to Coinmarketcap data, BLUR's current market capitalization is $294 million, and its total market capitalization is $2.428 billion. X2Y2's current market capitalization is $25.9 million, and its total market capitalization is $144 million. Looksrare's current market capitalization is $130 million, and its total market capitalization is $280 million. In addition, according to previous financing news, Opensea's primary market valuation is $13.3 billion.
According to data from the NFT data website nftscan, in the past three months, the Blur platform accounted for 33.54% of the NFT market transaction share, Opensea accounted for 33.12%, X2Y2 accounted for 22.39%, and Looksrare accounted for 10.55%.
It can be seen that the total market value of Blur, which has the highest share of the NFT market, is only one-fifth of the valuation of Opensea, which ranks second. Even if Opensea is considered to be financed during the bull market cycle, Blur is slightly undervalued compared to it. Compared with X2Y2, which ranks second, Blur occupies 1.5 times the NFT market share and has a market value that is more than 10 times that of Blur. This part of the overflow valuation is to a certain extent because Blur has the endorsement of leading investment institutions such as Paradigm, and its influence is wider and farther, which makes the market have higher expectations for it. X2Y2 has only grown in the community and has not yet announced its investment institutions, which makes the market have low expectations for it and its valuation lags behind by comparison. (Recommended reading: "Blur is about to open, what should be the reasonable valuation?")
 Summarize
Blur airdrop has once again brought benefits to the crypto community users, and has also made more people start using the Blur platform from the sidelines, thus achieving a win-win situation. From the perspective of its token economic model, Blur not only benefits the community in terms of the vesting cycle, but also allocates more than half of the total supply to the community in terms of the number of tokens distributed, which is rare in cryptocurrency projects. The distribution process is distributed by incentivizing platform users, combined with the distribution of governance rights of Blur DAO, which is relatively close to the purpose of Blur's official community governance.
Judging from its airdrop method, Blur officials, like Optimism officials, understand how to use airdrop incentives to guide users and operate the platform, thereby maximizing the incentive effect. As previously stated in an article by PANews, Blur's three airdrop cycles in the first quarter incentivized all NFT community users to bring seed users to achieve publicity purposes, and then incentivized sellers, buyers, and creators to allow users to use the product in all aspects to improve retention. Instead of being like other project parties, either strictly checking out all witches, or roughly distributing airdrops evenly, both are "lazy politics." This kind of non-refined airdrop method has no benefit to the project itself in the long run.
From the perspective of market value comparison, Blur is undervalued compared to Opensea, which has enjoyed the top dividends. However, compared to platforms such as X2Y2, which have started from scratch, grown in the community, and have relatively advanced product experience, Blur's market value is relatively overvalued, to a certain extent because of its investment institutions, team and other background advantages. Of course, it is undeniable that Blur's product experience is far ahead of other NFT platforms.
Blur airdrops are still being claimed. According to Coinmarketcap data, the total transaction volume of BLUR tokens in the past 12 hours was 702 million US dollars, of which centralized exchanges accounted for the largest proportion, 517 million US dollars, and the turnover rate was high. Its secondary market price also fell back to the current stable level after opening high. Users who hope to receive Blur's second season airdrop can bid or list NFT on the Blur official website.