$BLUR is finally here. After delaying the release of the platform’s native token in January, the NFT marketplace officially began allowing users to redeem care packages for the token at 1:30 p.m. coinbase tweeting which would list the token if the liquidity conditions are met and Blur Trading Volume increasing in the last month, cementing its place as one of the top ten NFT markets out there.
How did Blur manage to do all this in such a short time? And how is your token launch going? Here, we break down everything you need to know about the market’s recent rise to NFT stardom, and why its native token launch is such a defining event for the platform, its users, and Web3.
Blur’s Web3 Appeal
Blur’s rise has been undeniable. Founded by Web3 dev pac man and launched in October 2022, the low-cost, optional royalties marketplace has seen more than $430 million in trading volume in the last 30 days. That number is especially impressive given that Blur’s collective trading volume amounted to more than $301 million between its release in October 2022 until the end of December.
The market success is the result of their strategy to target a specific demographic of Web3 users: the professional trader. While platforms like OpenSea or Objkt appeal more to the more casual NFT enthusiast who engages in smaller trades on an occasional basis, Blur is meant to hook those who engage in high-volume trades on a reasonable frequency. The market’s stance on royalties, which has generally been to keep royalties as low as possible and allow merchants the choice of whether or not to enforce them, speaks to this approach. This is also the reason why, while Web3 giant OpenSea constantly has more daily active usersBlur rivals and occasionally exceeds the platform in trading volume.
What is $BLUR?
$BLUR is the long-awaited native Blur token. It is an ERC-20 governance token that will have a maximum supply of three billion. Twelve percent of that offer is assigned to airdrop holders, with another 78 percent delegated to two block contracts and nine percent owned by a multi-sig wallet controlled by the Blur team. The oldest information on CoinMarketCap put the token’s fully diluted market cap at $14 billion, with a single $BLUR token currently trading for just under $5.00, but the most recent figures drop sharply to just under $2.5 billion and $0.69 .
Users have been collecting $BLUR in the form of airdrops from the platform for the past few months. He first airdrop rewarded those who “stayed in the bear market”, meaning anyone who traded NFTs on Ethereum in the six months before Blur launched in October. The second consisted of $BLUR Care Packages for platform users who listed NFTs on Blur (after reaching a certain threshold) from October 19 to December 5. The third was aimed at merchants who made offers on Blur and was the the largest of the three airdrops. Asset users who kept up with this system they have highly anticipated the token launch.
Pacman has said that Blur has done everything possible to avoid incentivizing volume as a Web3 platform, as this encourages wash trading, resulting in distorted metrics and a lower quality product to offer to your user base. Having incentivized liquidity instead through its second airdrop by rewarding users who listed NFTs on their platform (and not giving users any rewards for the actual sale of those NFTs), removed the wash trade payment. And with the third airdrop focused on Blur offers, the marketplace followed suit, especially by providing higher rewards to offers that were closer to the floor prices and better reflected the actual market price of those NFTs.
utility $BLUR
$BLUR will be used as a market governance token, allowing the platform to move towards a more decentralized future. Blur is also taking a unique approach to the royalty debate with its token dynamic, as users of the platform who choose to keep creator royalties are rewarded with more tokens.
Web3 will have to wait and see how Blur users react to the launch of the $BLUR token. Nansen, a Web3 analytics company, recently highlighted how LooksRare users responded to that platform’s native token when it was launched, taking into account that most holders sold, transferred or staked their token. For now, users need to be diligent about preventing malicious actors from trying to siphon their tokens, as keen observers have noted. fake Blur token contracts is implemented to trick users of the platform who are not careful.
Token releases can do wonders for Web3 entities, but they must be navigated correctly. Despite Blur’s recent success, it doesn’t have the pedigree of an NFT mainstay like the Bored Ape Yacht Club. How your community responds to the launch (and what utility and value it brings to them) is likely to have a massive impact on the future of the emerging market giant. If you’re not careful, things could get very blurry very quickly.
