The JPEG Battle: Blur Dangles $300 Million For NFT Traders To Abandon OpenSea

Last week, the NFT and crypto space was lit with activity when NFT marketplace Blur announced what it said was Season 1 of its token airdrop. A total of 360 million BLUR tokens were airdropped to active participants on the platform, with the highest airdrop reportedly worth around $4 million. Now, the NFT platform is back once again with another massive airdrop, but with new conditions.

Blur Says Leave OpenSea, Share $300 Million

In a tweet that has ignited further competition between the two NFT marketplaces, Blur has encouraged NFT traders to leave OpenSea in favor of its own platform. In the tweet, Blur announced that it was preparing for ‘Season 2’ of its token drop worth around $300 million. However, this time around, it is adding a new requirement. 

The NFT marketplace introduced what it calls ‘100% loyalty’ which automatically increases users’ chances of getting more tokens. Blur made a multiple-tweet thread to explain this but it basically boils down to one thing; do not trade NFTs anywhere else.

Effectively, Blur said that users who list their NFTs only on their marketplace and nowhere else will be able to achieve 100% loyalty. Users with 100% loyalty are more likely to receive Mythical Care Packages, worth apparently 100x more than Uncommon Care Packages. This translates to more tokens being airdropped to the user.

However, it doesn’t end here as Blur has introduced more ways for users to receive points for the airdrops. It said all contributions to the Blur community would be rewarded, even going as far as counting quote tweets explaining why they use the NFT marketplace as contributions.

Top NFT Marketplaces Do Battle

Since the Blur airdrop just a week ago, the competition among the NFT marketplaces has been fiercer than ever. Blur quickly gained on OpenSea and overtook it in terms of volume in the one-week period, despite having around half the number of traders that OpenSea has.

To put this in perspective, in the last week, Blur has recorded volumes of over $615 million whereas OpenSea’s volume has come out to just over $159 million in the same time period. But OpenSea saw over 124,000 traders compared to Blur’s 55,000 traders.

The surge in volume is a result of traders ‘farming’ airdrop points leading to many bidding above the floor prices of various NFT collections. With higher bids, there have been higher sales on the marketplace with an average price of $1,780, according to data from DappRadar.

OpenSea previously responded to Blur’s challenge by offering zero trading fees for a limited time. However, traders have not responded positively to this as they continue to flock to Blur in hopes of receiving more tokens.