Twitter user Coby had a very controversial take last year when he referred to NFTs as shitcoins with pictures. I have recently begun to reevaluate my view of NFTs as cultural markers of taste as I observe the frenzy around the new NFT marketplace BLUR.

Blur is an upstart NFT marketplace that has managed to overtake trading volume on OpenSea by a wide margin over the last few weeks. This is partly due to the gamification of trading on the Blur marketplace where users can earn Blur tokens by buying and selling NFTs.

According to DappRadar, over the last 30 days:

Upstart Blur has generated over $1.24 billion in trading volume.

While established OpenSea is sitting at a trading volume of $436 Million.

To be trailing an up-and-coming marketplace by about 1/3 of the trading volume is a major blow to Open Sea, the once-dominant NFT trading platform.

With the NFT marketplace wars heating up, it’s worth asking what makes Blur such a strong competitor.

✅ Blur does not have any marketplace fees.

✅ Blur does not enforce creator royalties.

✅ Blur’s implementation of its native token rewards incentivizes high-frequency trading on the platform.

More than anything else, it’s the token rewards that have led to Blur’s dominance as an NFT marketplace.

In season 1, Blur airdropped its native token to everyone who traded on the platform. While the exact tokenomics and criteria for the airdrop were not explicit, it was clear that those who transacted frequently on the Blur platform received a greater share of the Airdrop token pool.

After the Season 1 token distribution, crypto Twitter was in a frenzy as the FOMO for those who missed out reached a fever pitch.

With Season 2 underway, Blur has clarified how users can take part in the next airdrop.

Traders can accrue “Listing Points” and “Bid Points” by interacting with the platform and their odds of receiving an airdrop increase in proportion to the number of points they have. Moreover, users can increase their odds of receiving the Blur airdrop by making use of all of Blur’s listing and bidding features.

While Open Sea will not compete with Blur on token airdrops for regulatory reasons, they have been forced to make changes to their policies on creator royalties.

OpenSea recently announced that they will temporarily eliminate their 2.5% marketplace fee as well as their enforcement of creator royalties on NFT sales.

“There’s been a massive shift in the NFT ecosystem, In October, we started to see meaningful volume and users move to NFT marketplaces that don’t fully enforce creator earnings. Today, that shift has accelerated dramatically despite our best efforts.” - OpenSea Twitter

With the erosion of creator royalties and the further infusion of DeFi yield farming in NFT marketplaces, we can see NFTs for what they really are.

“It’s extremely simple. They are altcoins with pictures. Anything suggesting otherwise is larp and cope.” — Cobie (@cobie) August 14, 2022