What Is Blur? NFT Marketplace for Pro Traders — Ratings & Analysis

6 min readFeb 24, 2023

Blur’s native token $BLUR launched for trading has been the hottest topic these days, so what is Blur? Can it shake up Opensea? Let’s find out together.

Blur is an NFT marketplace built on the Ethereum mainnet and also a trading aggregator. Compared with other NFT marketplaces such as X2Y2 and LooksRare, which focus on retail users, Blur focuses more on Pro NFT traders.

Specifically, Blur offers batch shelf and floor-sweeping transactions (which refer to buying multiple NFTs with the lowest price at once) on top of order book NFT transactions, providing traders with a more convenient batch operation. At the same time, buyers can not only see NFTs for sale on Blur, but also browse NFTs on other NFT marketplaces on Blur and place orders directly through Blur.

In addition, Blur’s fee structure is also very friendly to traders, where the transaction fee is 0, i.e. Blur does not charge any fees from transactions. On the other hand, Blur is also more trader-friendly in terms of royalties, which are set by the creators on marketplaces such as Opensea and Rarible, and are compulsory for a certain percentage of secondary transactions. Blur recommends a default royalty rate of 0.5% for buyers, but buyers can also customize the royalty rate, even setting it to 0.

What Is TokenInsight’s Rating for Blur?

TokenInsight has rated Blur’s current performance with a BB and a positive outlook. It ranks top on the list of NFT marketplaces. Ratings of other NFT marketplaces: X2Y2 (B), LooksRare (BB), etc.

The breakdown of the rating results is scored as follows.

Underlying Technology & Security 41.5%
Roadmap & Progress 59.33%
Token Economics 68%
Token Performance 59.93%
Ecosystem Development 56.4%
Team, Partners & Investors 65.33%

Underlying Technology & Security (41.5%)

Blur has made public in its official documentation 1 smart contract audit report completed by Dedaub, completed on January 20, 2023. The audit mainly covers minor updates to the NFT marketplace and new governance modules. According to the report, a critical vulnerability in the governance module was identified and has not yet been fixed.

Blur also runs a vulnerability bounty program on the code4rena, but does not make the official code base publicly available on GitHub. As of February 2023, Blur has not experienced any security-related crisis incidents.

Roadmap & Progress (59.33%)

Blur mainnet whet live in October 2022, with airdrops progressively distributed to Blur users. On February 15, 2023, its native token, $BLUR, went live. On February 23, 2023, Blur announced its Airdrop Season 2 and Community Idea Map. The roadmap does not explicitly announce specific plans and timelines, but according to the information revealed, the next phase of Blur’s development plans may include a new fee structure and royalty program, a partnership with Artblocks, and more.

Source: Blur Community Idea Map

Token Economics (68%)

$BLUR is Blur’s native governance token, with a maximum supply of 3 billion. In addition to decentralized governance, Blur has not yet announced other usage for $BLUR.

According to Blur’s disclosed distribution plan, 49% of $BLUR total supply will be distributed to core contributors, early investors and the advisory team. These tokens vesting over 4 years. 40% will be unlocked in year 1, 30% in year 2, and so on. The remaining 51% of the total supply will be distributed to community, of which 12% has already been used for retroactive airdrops or incentive programs prior to February 14, 10% has been voted in for the next incentive season, and the remaining 29% will be distributed based on governance proposal. The detailed distribution and vesting plan are as below.

$BLUR Distribution Plan, Source: Blur’s details page on TokenInsight

Token Performance (59.93%)

$BLUR launched on February 15, 2023. As of February 22nd, $BLUR is available on OKX, Uniswap, DigiFinex, Coinbase, and many other exchanges. According to TokenInisght, $BLUR currently has the highest volume on OKX, accounting for 30% of total trading volume.

The price of $BLUR reached over $2 at the beginning of the launch, and then quickly dropped to around $0.6. As Blur became more and more trending, the price of $Blur gradually rose to a high of around $1.4 in the following days. According to the latest data, on February 22, the price of $BLUR dropped back to around $1, which is about 30% lower than ATH.

In terms of trading volume, $BLUR’s 24h spot trading volume reached more than $500 million on its first day launched, and the average daily volume for the following days remained stable at around $300 million, almost equal to its circulating market cap.

Source: Blur’s details page on TokenInsight

Ecosystem Development (56.4%)

Blur’s daily volume jumped from around $15 million before February 14 to over $80 million on the 15th, as a result of the $BLUR launch and subsequent incentive plan. Blur’s volume was not significantly impacted by OpenSea’s announcement on February 18 that it would launch a limited time 0 fee trading, with Opensea collecting $230 million in volume on that day.

Blur has even overtaken Opensea by capturing more than half of the NFT marketplace share in terms of average daily volume over the past 30 days.

Source: Dune Analytics@sealaunch

While Blur has surpassed Opensea in terms of average daily volume, it still has a gap with Opensea in terms of daily active users. Blur’s average daily active users over the past 30 days is only about 5,000, while Opensea’s active users are three times higher than Blur’s, at over 15,000.

Source: Dune Analytics@sealaunch

Closing Thoughts

Blur, a new generation chanllenger, has become the largest among NFT marketplaces in terms of volume, shaking Opensea that had not been shaken in the past few years. But Opensea still has a strong user base, and Blur still needs to create more attractive products for Opensea’s loyal users. And in addition to PFP, artwork is also a big category for NFT, as we mentioned last year in our TokenInsight NFT Industry Report 2022 Jan — May, where artwork was second only to PFP, accounting for about 10% of the overall NFT market volume. Royalties are one of the main reasons why content creators choose NFT, and they are not destined to choose a marketplace if they can’t make any profit from secondary market sales. This is one of the issues Blur needs to think about.

In addition, Blur, as a project that has not launched for long, has many common problems with emerging projects: no publicly available codebase, not detailed official docs, not enough native token usage, etc. As the project continues to evolve, we believe the Blur team will have more time to polish these parts that need improvement.

Based on the above information, TokenInsight has assigned Blur a BB rating with a positive outlook.

Read the original article at: https://tokeninsight.com/en/research/analysts-pick/what-is-blur-nft-marketplace-for-pro-traders-ratings-analysis

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