Data update date for this article: 2/9/2023
01 Project introduction
Blur is an aggregator-style NFT marketplace with professional traders as its starting point. In addition to its own native trading platform, it integrates the three major NFT markets of the Ethereum chain. It has completed more than 14 million US dollars in financing, led by Paradigm, and 6529, Zeneca and other NFT big KOLs have participated in the investment. In just half a year after it was officially launched, the market share quickly rose to the second position.
02 NFT market
Since the first NFT was born on April 21, 2011, NFT has a history of more than ten years. But in recent years, the concept of NFT has only been understood and accepted by more crypto players. The NFT trading market has gone through several important stages. Opensea, as everyone knows, was launched in December 2017 and has become the industry leader in five years. As the market develops and trends change, more and more competitors appear, the entire industry becomes more diverse, and the market value of NFT continues to rise. From June 2021 to January 2022 is the period of rapid development of the NFT market. At its peak, the total market value was as high as 33.7 billion U.S. dollars, and it is currently 22.7 billion U.S. dollars.
The figure below shows the specific data of the mainstream NFT trading market during the period of 2022/10/20-2023/2/8 (Blur has been online since its launch).
From the above data, it can be easily seen that the current mainstream NFT markets on Ethereum are Blur, Opensea, X2Y2, and LooksRare. According to the comprehensive measurement of data such as transaction volume/transaction number, Blur ranks second. Although there is water in the data, as a rising star, it must have its own uniqueness in being able to defeat many predecessors in terms of data. According to the data in the figure, the total value of transactions on Blur exceeds Opensea, but the number of Gas, traders, and wallets consumed is much lower than that of Opensea. This is closely related to Blur’s operating methods. Let’s start to explain Blur’s product features and development process. .
03 Product Features
Blur was built by a senior team from large companies such as MIT, Square, Y combinator, and Citadel. At the beginning of its launch, it combined the functions of Opensea and Gem and used the order flow mode, which is more suitable for high-frequency traders. Before Blur, high-frequency traders need to open several websites at the same time to conduct transactions, such as NFTnerds (payment tool) for viewing data and grabbing the floor, and Gem for batch scanning and batch placing orders.
There are many new projects in the NFT market every day, and high-frequency traders will earn a certain amount of profit by buying and selling during the FOMO stage. In the FOMO stage, everyone will sweep the floor crazily. If you want to obtain higher profits, you need to accurately observe the latest pending orders on multiple platforms at the same time, and buy at a faster speed. During this process, there will often be failures in sweeping goods. Players who experienced Opensea's floor-sweeping crash in the early days felt deeply. Prior to this, only NFTnerds was relatively complete in this function, but it required a fee to use it. In response to this demand, Blur ported and optimized the functions of NFTnerds, and provided them for free, attracting a wave of NFTnerds users. At the same time, for NFT projects with low unit prices, the function of batch scanning is just needed for professional traders. Blur integrates this function to solve the two major pain points of traders in one stop.
In summary, Blur's current product features can be summarized as follows:
Faster (0.4 seconds for Pending, 4 seconds for pending order data)
Multi-platform aggregation
Low Gas (Gas is low when purchasing a single NFT pending order, and higher Gas will be consumed when purchasing pending orders on different platforms in batches, but the failure rate is low)
0 handling fee
Blur does not have more innovations in products. It integrates the existing useful functions in the NFT market and partially optimizes them. From the perspective of user experience at the transaction level, it is indeed the best in all NFT markets. OK From a certain point of view, Blur's success in products comes from the lack of efforts of competitors.
A good user experience is a plus point, not enough to form a barrier. Technical and operational capabilities are the cornerstones of long-term sustainable development, especially at the operational level. Blur’s three rounds of AirDrop have allowed Blur to It has become a strong opponent of Opensea.
04 Operation Analysis
4.1 AirDrop Expected Pavement
In March 2022, Blur announced that it had received $13 million in financing led by Paradigm. On May 5th, the Blur Waitlist was released, and the major NFT communities began to spread the Blur invitation code fissionally. With a strong financing background and AirDrop expectations, it spread rapidly. A user can get 5 invitations. After registering with the invitation code, a certain amount of points will be obtained, and the card reveals that the AirDrop can be obtained through the points.
4.2 The first AirDrop: activate potential users
On October 19th, Blur announced that it will be officially launched the next day, and announced the first round of AirDrop rules, based on the transaction volume of the wallet in the past 6 months to obtain Boxs AirDrop. Boxs cleverly introduced the blind box mechanism, which is divided into three levels: UNCOMMON, RARE, and LEGENDARY. Taking advantage of the Degen psychology of players, it finally attracted 4,881 wallets to participate in the activation, which is close to the number of wallets in Opensea 10/1.
4.3 The second AirDrop: Encourage real transactions
On the day of launch, the rules for the second AirDrop were also announced. Users are encouraged to place orders through Blur, and wallets that meet the requirements before November will receive a certain number of AirDrop Boxes. At the same time, the introduction of a loyalty mechanism will compare the price of pending orders on other platforms, with the purpose of encouraging users to place real orders. At the same time, because of the controversy about 0 royalties at the beginning, Blur advocated that the higher the royalty setting, the higher the loyalty, and thus more AirDrop. The AirDrop mechanism is similar to the previous model used by LooksRare. The time reserved at the beginning was relatively short, so it did not have an obvious effect. Later, the official chose to extend the time of this round of AirDrop activities to the end of November. From the data changes marked in red in Figure 5 - Figure 7, it can be seen that due to the impact of the overall NFT market decline, the number of active users fluctuated a bit, but at the end of the event, the number of active wallets in a single day basically doubled.
As shown in Figure 8, during this round of AirDrop, the proportion of Blur's unique users relative to Opensea has increased significantly.
4.4 The third AirDrop: Attracting big investors
With the recovery of the market, without the incentive of AirDrop, the overall data of Blur has also increased to a certain extent. Subsequently, Blur announced on December 6 that at least one bid is required to receive the second AirDrop. The third AirDrop also requires users to bid to obtain AirDrop. This will be the largest amount of Blur AirDrop(about the second round 1-2 times of the AirDrop). This is also the reason why Blur's transaction volume/wallet ratio is much larger than that of Opensea since December, and it also indirectly increased the transaction volume and floor price of blue-chip NFT projects such as BAYC and Azuki.
From the chart data of Top Buyers and Top Sellers in Figure 9, it can be seen that the wallet addresses of large buyers and sellers are highly overlapped, and they may also be the biggest beneficiaries of Blur AirDrop. After the token is officially launched, we can track The entry and exit of these ten addresses.
05 Blur status quo
5.1 Bid Fund Pool
Previously, when users bid on NFT on Opensea, they needed to convert ETH to WETH first. Blur's bid introduces the form of a fund pool. Before bidding, users must deposit ETH into the pool to bid for NFT, and the user's funds in the pool can be deposited and withdrawn at any time. There is no amount and time limit, and the money will flow into the fund pool. When there is not enough ETH in the user's wallet, Blur will also automatically use the auction pool balance to complete the purchase, giving users enough reasons to keep money in the pool. At present, there are 29,604 ETH in the fund pool, which is about 48.88 million US dollars. The smart contract of this fund pool has been audited by Code4rena.
5.2 Points Leaderboard
The current ranking list can only see the top 500 rankings within 24 hours, so the uncertainty of the data is very large, and only a rough estimate can be made. According to the prediction data provided by Twitter @OlivierLerch, he captured the total number of AirDrop in the top 500, and added 25% to estimate on this basis. Initial circulation of 25 million US dollars), the AirDrop accounted for 5%, the minimum price of Blur tokens is $4.17, and Figure 11 is an estimate for more situations.
The current off-site purchase price of points is around 3-4U, which is in line with the above estimation. Boxes are currently 4U outside the venue. Many users forgot to claim Boxes in the second round, and the weight may be assigned to the third round. The specific token model has to wait for official data, and it is currently a game.
5.3 Profit Model
It is currently in the stage of burning money, and its subsequent development strategy may be different from other mainstream NFT trading markets that rely on handling fees to make profits. Judging from some of the previous actions (such as the Bid fund pool), Blur may introduce NFTfi gameplay to earn income from the perspective of DeFi. For example, the current NFT loans made by BendDAO and X2Y2 may be in the direction of Blur's scalability, which is conducive to the formation of a closed loop within the NFT ecosystem.
5.4 Exchange
At present, it has been announced that the BLUR token will be launched on 2.14. Huobi, OKX, KuCoin, Gate.io , and ByBit are the only exchanges that are short of Binance.
5.5 Potential risks
As an NFT transaction aggregator, Blur's competitors Opensea, X2Y2, and Looksrare are also important sources of orders, which may affect the normal operation of some functions due to the lack of cooperation of opponents. Prior to this, Blur, like LooksRare and SudoSwap, was blacklisted by Opensea because it did not impose a creator fee (royalty), which resulted in OFR-based NFT collections not being able to place orders on Blur. Subsequent Blur successfully bypassed the blacklist by rebuilding the service using Opensea's NFT trading protocol "Opensea Seaport". In addition to Opensea's OFR-based NFT, Yuga Labs' Sewer Pass NFT can also be processed.
06 Project Summary
The world has been struggling with Opensea for a long time. With its leading advantage, its income from handling fees is as high as 210 million U.S. dollars a year. Product development is still poor and stagnant, and it chooses the capital route, which to some extent violates the idea of Web3. As a more decentralized product, Blur is more popular with veteran crypto players, and its functionality is more in line with the usage habits of high-frequency traders.
Blur uses AirDrop to attract traffic, and uses product experience to retain users. After the AirDrop, the author believes that the number of Blur's real users will not decline significantly in the short term, and is expected to continue to grow in the medium and long term. The author looks forward to Blur's continuous innovation and polishing of products in the future, and will pay attention to the economic model and token utility of BLUR tokens, hoping that its tokens can continue to empower the entire ecosystem, rather than simply governing. TokenMore will also continue to follow up the progress of Blur's project.
Follow Bimoe official Twitter to capture more value: https://twitter.com/TokenMore https://twitter.com/ETH28888
