Leading NFT marketplace Blur will allow NFT buyers to make a down payment on NFT’s they want to buy. They can then pay off the remaining balance with monthly installments, as if it were a home or a car. It’s just one of the features of Blur to make the NFT market more liquid. 

Launched in October 2022, NFT marketplace Blur overtook market leader OpenSea in December last year, measured in trading volume. Currently, it has about three times more volume. Blur was more aggressive than OpenSea in terms of incentivizing traders, for example incentivizing traders with an airdrop. The new Blend functionality is another example. 

Blend stands for Blur Lending and is a peer-to-peer lending protocol that allows users to either:

• Take a loan (in ETH) by putting an expensive NFT up for collateral. (Currently, one can only borrow ETH against Crypto Punks, Azukis and Miladys.)
• Buy an NFT right away by providing a down payment of less than 10% of the total value of the NFT and pay the rest later. 

Blend loans have a fixed in interest rate and are perpetual loans, which means they have no end date. Lenders can exit and sell their loan by starting a Dutch auction to find a new lender. In a Dutch auction, the bidding starts high and drops until a bid is found.

The benefits for users

In short: Blend gives more people access to NFT’s and their price gains (hopefully). This works in a similar way to people getting a mortgage, or financing a second home with their first home as collateral. If you own an NFT on BLUR, you don’t have to first sell it to buy another one. Also, if you want to speculate on the upside of an NFT collection you can do so, even if you can’t afford the floor price.  

Blur’s token BLUR functions as a reward for traders who list NFT’s and bid on them. To kickstart Blend, Blur gives ‘airdrop points’ to users that engage in loans. A second airdrop of BLUR tokens is on the horizon.

The benefit for the NFT market

Blend is another example of Blur trying to solve the biggest problem for NFT markets, namely that they’re not very liquid. There aren’t a lot of buyers and sellers at any time for a particular NFT. Suppose in our housing market mortgages didn't exist as a ‘lubricant’. It would be a lot harder to find a buyer for your beautiful home if they had to pay the full amount on the spot. 

Developments in the world of NFT’s are going fast. Another example is the imminent launch (May 15) of Amazon’s NFT marketplace.