Blur tops critical metrics in race to ace NFT marketplace, but…

• Blur has dominated trading volume throughout February 2023.
• It has, however, lagged in the number of transactions.

Blur has come a long way from its inception, which was less than two years ago. With such rapid expansion, at press time, it was overtaking OpenSea as the premier NFT marketplace. 

Battle for dominance gets fiercer 

Even though it only began in October, the Ethereum [ETH]-based protocol for institutional traders has already captured 46% of the overall weekly market share, leaving OpenSea in the dust with only 36%.

According to Dune Analytics, Blur had the highest average daily transaction volume in the NFT sector until press time, at about $14.3 million compared to OpenSea’s $11.3 million. For most of December 2022 and the first few days of January 2023, Blur’s trading volume was higher than OpenSea.

Source: Dune Analytics

While OpenSea saw over 3,000 trades, the marketplace witnessed over 5,000 as of this writing. As a result, Blur has attracted more volume than other marketplaces, with OpenSea serving as its sole genuine rival.

Herein lies the difference

Despite Blur’s popularity, it was still second to OpenSea in one statistic, even though OpenSea had more in total volume. As seen in a graph generated by Dune Analytics, OpenSea outperformed the competition when comparing sales counts.

Insight into the workings of both markets would explain why this is the case. Unlike Blur, which appeared to cater to institutional, high-volume trading, OpenSea was accessible to regular investors and other market participants.

Source: Dune Analytics

On 14 November, Blur said that it would impose creator royalties, taking a position in the creator royalty debate that had shaken the industry. However, the marketplace reaffirmed its commitment to continue its zero-fee policy, which has drawn traders to it.

In the post, they said they would help creators weed out marketplaces that did not impose creator fees. In addition, early sources indicated that the release of the BLUR token would occur in less than a week, counting down from press time.