The news of "Brother Maji" Huang Licheng's "exiting the NFT circle" not only pushed himself to the forefront, but also once again sent the NFT rookie trading platform Blur to the saliva stage.
In February of this year, in Blur's "Bid for AirDrop" (Bid for Airdrop) first-quarter AirDrop incentive plan, NFT big player Huang Licheng won a large number of platform tokens BLUR distributed to him by the Blur platform with his position at the top of the loyalty scoreboard , It is reported that millions of dollars have been cashed out.
When the AirDrop in the second season tied the points and bids more deeply, "Brother Maji" hit the list for the second time, and became the "receiver" of the NFT seller when he got the points with the bid. The BLUR AirDrop in the second season has not yet arrived , The loss-making business began. According to data, Huang Licheng has lost 5,000 ETH on Blur, worth tens of thousands of dollars.
The loss of big players also made the NFT community focus on the incentive mechanism of the Blur platform. It uses the mechanism of linking pending orders/bids with points, and then using points to link AirDrop in the later period. OpenSea, the leading NFT trading market, but this mechanism has also attracted the phenomenon of giant whale users using different accounts to "sell and buy" points on the platform.
False transactions are gathering on Blur, and the "Monkey Godfather" will inevitably overturn.
Floating loss of 5000ETH "Monkey Godfather" lost money
The singer Huang Licheng, who debuted as a hip-hop singer, is known as the "Monkey Godfather" in the Chinese NFT circle. "Monkey" is the Chinese common name of the "Boring Ape (BAYC)" series, the leading project in the NFT market, and "Brother Maji" Huang Licheng holds a large number of NFTs of this series, and has always been regarded as a big player in the market and a "big guy" in the circle.
On April 15th, the boss suddenly tweeted "I want to quit the circle", accompanied by 9 pictures of BAYC.
Then, bewildering behavior emerged. Two days after the official announcement of "retiring from the circle", Huang Licheng played the "Bored Ape Yacht Club" (full name of "BAYC" of Bored Ape Submarine Club) picture "Solitaire" game on Twitter and the community, and finally put a BAYC picture Sticking to the top seems to express reluctance to "monkey". On April 18, "Brother Maji" personally expressed his "reluctance"-purchased 2 more BAYCs and the series' derivative NFT BACK (2 pieces) and MAYC (1 piece) on the NFT trading market Blur.
Currently, Huang Licheng puts BAYC's tweet on the top to replace the "Declaration of Retiring from the Circle".
It can be seen that the "Monkey Godfather" has not really withdrawn from the circle, and his repeated expressions are probably no different from ordinary people venting their emotions on social platforms. What fans are curious about is why "Brother Maji" suddenly became angry with the NFT circle.
The most recent event associated with this is the "Blur AirDrop".
Blur is an NFT market for professional traders, with built-in aggregated trading functions. After its launch in October 2022, it launched an AirDrop plan for the platform token BLUR—distributing tokens to eligible users. This is a common method for NFT trading platforms to increase transaction volume data, user stickiness and activity, and the issued platform tokens can be directly cashed out for profit after being launched on the secondary market of encrypted assets.
On February 15th, BLUR tokens were officially launched and AirDrop. It is reported that Blur AirDrop 360 million BLUR in the first quarter, making a large number of early bird users rich. It is estimated that 34 wallets received more than 500,000 BLUR, and another 23 wallets received more than 1 million BLUR.
"Brother Maji" Huang Licheng is one of the high-level players. According to statistics, he had received more than 1.84 million BLUR in that AirDrop. The media has tracked and revealed that Huang Licheng cleared the BLUR he received from the AirDrop at a price of 0.71 US dollars. Based on this calculation, he directly made a profit of about 1.3 million US dollars.
Huang Licheng, who received the AirDrop, also sent a message to express his gratitude to Blur, and did not forget to mock Blur's competitor, OpenSea, the leading NFT trading platform, "When you trade NFT next time, don't forget that OpenSea has not given a coin. "
Huang Licheng once wrote to thank the Blur team
On February 22, Blur began to warm up for the nearly 300 million BLUR AirDrop in the second quarter. It clearly stated that the condition for obtaining AirDrop is mainly to examine the "loyalty" of users. This indicator is directly reflected in transaction points, and the points are related to the user's Pending orders and auctions are highly correlated. On the Internet, a large number of tutorials have emerged as the times require. Some tutorials say that if they work well, they can double the points, which means that the number of BLURs obtained will also increase.
Blur used AirDrop to stimulate the Liquidity of the platform. Some users paid for the AirDrop with pending orders and bidding traces for the first quarter of the "myth of creating wealth", which provided market depth and trading opportunities for other NFT traders.
Huang Licheng doesn't know which type of market he belongs to, but he has always been at the top of the scoreboard, and he is obviously a user who places orders and bids frequently. Judging from historical data, the second batch of BLUR AirDrop has not yet arrived, and "Brother Maji" has become a "receiver" for NFT sell-off users.
According to address tracking data, Huang Licheng received 71 BAYC on Blur, with a total value of more than 9 million US dollars. This is still a beginning. Since then, 800 Gitcoin Presents NFTs and 120 Cryptopunks NFTs have been collected by "Brother Maji".
At present, it is not difficult to find out that Huang Licheng still has a large number of NFTs in his hands by checking the address through Blur, and almost all NFTs are in the pending order state. Recently, the floor prices of various NFTs in the market have fallen sharply. Most of the NFTs held by Huang are in a state of loss. The floating loss of NFTs in the Yuga Labs ecosystem alone is 1100 ETH.
Huang Licheng's floating loss of holding NFT
@punk9059, the research director of PROOF, a senior community in the NFT market, tracked the on-chain address of "Brother Machi" and found that since Blur's AirDrop in the second season, Huang Licheng (ETH) has accumulated a loss of 5,000 ETH(worth 10 million US dollars).
The official AirDrop of the second season of Blur is still being postponed. At the end of March, Blur extended the deadline for the second season AirDrop from April 1 to May 1. This may make users who spend points every day face double the risk. "Delayed notification", Huang Licheng once commented on "Fuck" on Twitter, a dirty word is enough to show dissatisfaction.
After a short operation, "Brother Maji" fell into a predicament of getting worse and worse, and was accused by some users of "scoring points" with pending orders/auctions, creating trading volume bubbles for Blur with "cleanse transactions", and so on. Being scolded for losing money, it is not difficult to understand why Huang Licheng is angry on Twitter and "retires from the circle" seems to have repeated feelings of unwillingness.
Score points for BLUR and fall into a Liquidity trap
Even the "Monkey Godfather" has not escaped the temptation of Blur. This NFT trading platform has recently received attention again because of Huang Licheng's "retirement" incident.
Blur's "Bid for Airdrop" (bidding for AirDrop) incentive mechanism is very similar to the remaining "trading is mining" mechanism used by encrypted asset trading platforms. The difference is that Blur encourages users to bid for NFT. In essence, this kind of AirDrop mechanism is to stimulate the Liquidity of the trading market. When the Liquidity is up, the trading volume data will often be very good-looking.
Blur transaction volume (orange part) once surpassed OpenSea
Blur’s AirDrop in the first season contributed to the “myth of creating wealth”. Many celebrities in the NFT circle, including “Brother Moji” and Franklin, have added points to the team, bringing trading activity to the platform, and its trading volume once surpassed OpenSea, the "big brother" of the NFT market, has also brought long-lost vitality to the entire NFT market.
But this kind of vitality is basically an "artificial" stimulus. To put it bluntly, it is caused by the incentive operation method of the Blur platform. The activity is concentrated on one platform, and the contribution is only supported by some big players, which is not big at all. The NFT market is filled with a wave of false prosperity.
The NFT data platform Dune shows that 50% of Blur's NFT trading volume comes from less than 300 wallets, and 1% of whale traders account for 84% of the total value locked (TVL) in Blur's bidding pool. This means that the trading volume of Blur is dominated by a small number of whale traders, and the trading enthusiasm of ordinary users is not high.
The giant whale "controls the market", and the distribution of BLUR AirDrop will also flow into the giant whale bag, but do you think the big players will really trade with each other? Otherwise, the NFT data platform CryptoSlam disclosed in March that at least $577 million in trading volume in the Blur market was created by "clean trading".
"Wash trading" is commonly known as "self-knocking", that is, the buyer and seller of a target are both themselves. Scott Hawkins, an engineer at CryptoSlam, pointed out that some Blur users are using different wallets to sell NFTs to themselves for the purpose of earning points and airdrops. "Because there is no need to pay royalties, there is no transaction fee. Any hindrance.” Hawkins bluntly stated that Blur artificially propped up the trading volume of the platform in a hypocritical way.
This kind of artificially stimulated Liquidity is likely to shrink rapidly with the end of the AirDrop activity. NFT researcher @0xPrimatic pointed out that Blur has paid millions of dollars to stimulate Liquidity. "Today's NFT Liquidity conditions are very Special, don't expect this to last forever."
This semblance of prosperity under false trading has already begun to endanger the market.
During the continuation of the Blur mechanism, the floor price of blue-chip NFT has experienced a series of declines. At that time, some analysts pointed out that in February this year, "Brother Maji" Huang Licheng sold 1010 NFTs on Blur.
The sell-off by large investors created panic in the market, and the floor price of BAYC dropped from 75 ETH to 55.89 ETH, a drop of 25.5% at one point. Although the floor price of BAYC has recovered, it still has not broken through 70 ETH.
Players buy a large number of NFTs by "sweeping the floor" to get AirDrop points. Once the stimulating incentive disappears, the NFTs in the hands of players become "hot potatoes". When it was unprofitable, they began to use Blur's Liquidity to sell the accumulated property. "Brother Maggie" obviously didn't run past the sellers.
The more hidden risk is that if the NFT market plummets, the drop in floor price will also lead to the phenomenon of "serial liquidation", because many NFTs in the market are in the financial market called NFT-Fi, and those users who pledge NFT will experience a series of sharp declines. face liquidation risk.
Blur, which made the "Monkey Godfather" fall into a trap, still does not intend to stop. Under the competitive landscape of NFT trading platforms, the platform's second season AirDrop plan is still going on. A giant whale has fallen into the trap, and the bubble brought by the BLUR AirDrop will eventually be punctured, and that needle is likely to be the price of BLUR.
The 300 million BLUR AirDrop in the second quarter will increase the circulation of the token in the secondary market. Some encrypted asset analysts have predicted that the price of BLUR is likely to drop after the AirDrop is officially distributed to users in the second quarter.
According to CoinGecko, BLUR is currently $0.8. The token once rose to $5 when the AirDrop was just sent out on February 15, and then quickly fell back to $1, and has remained below $1 for a long time.
