Blur is an NFT marketplace that was launched in October 2022. Already, it has become the largest NFT marketplace in terms of volume, overtaking OpenSea. The reason for its success? Lower fees, and more tools for professional traders. 

Currently, Blur processes 56% of trading volume, with OpenSea trailing (31%). This means that Blur and OpenSea combined dominate the market of NFT exchanges. Both marketplaces let you connect with your crypto wallet and directly buy and sell all the major NFT collections.

Despite its decline in trading volume, OpenSea keeps the lead with regards to the majority share of NFT sales (52%) and unique daily users (68%). This implies that OpenSea remains a starting point for new NFT buyers. The way you can browse collections in OpenSea, is more user-friendly. Whereas Blur's architecture makes it extra useful for professional NFT traders. 

No fees

Blur does not charge any marketplace fees, whereas OpenSea takes 2.5%. It’s clearly an aggressive move by Blur to gain market share, which may or may not be sustainable. In the long run, Blur may have to start charging fees. This reminds us of Uniswap, which until now hasn’t taken any cut of trading fees from liquidity providers – this might change with the so-called fee switch coming closer. 

Some pro tools

Blur features pro tools such as:

• Portfolio analysis
• Sweeping features (bulk purchases)
• A sniping tool: placing bids at the last minute to ensure the buy
• The fastest aggregator. Compared to Gem, Blur updates listings 12 times faster

BLUR token coming

In 2023, the BLUR token will launch. The project has been rewarding early adopters by two airdrops alrady. A third airdrop is scheduled for January 2023 for people who will start bidding. The more and the longer users bid, the bigger the airdrop they will get. 

Conclusion

Marketplaces like OpenSea and Blur have made NFT’s investible and tradeable objects. This is a huge deal: for the first time in history, there is now a global and liquid market for art. The sudden rise of Blur shows that NFT market space is rapidly evolving and not saturated yet. An interesting question will be if traditional, ‘web 2’ giants like Instagram will gain a foothold in this space. In any case, never mind the bear market: NFTs are going nowhere!