Blur NFT marketplace (BLUR)
The first NFT tokens appeared in 2017, but the first marketplaces for their purchase and sale appeared only two years later. The most famous projects were OpenSea, Rarible and Magic Eden, but later, more modern and functional platforms began to appear, including the NFT marketplace Blur. This article will talk about it.
What is Blur?
Blur is an NFT marketplace for professional traders and collectors based on Ethereum and Polygon blockchains. The platform was launched in October 2022 and quickly became one of the leading marketplaces on the market, surpassing even OpenSea in terms of trading volumes.
Blur is positioning itself as "more than an NFT marketplace, " which is aimed at advanced traders, long-term investors, and users looking for high-level infrastructure and a new user experience.
The Blur Marketplace is both beginner-friendly and functional for more experienced users. The project was backed at an early stage by well-known investment company Paradigm, which has also invested in crypto projects such as Uniswap and Coinbase.
How does Blur work?
One of the main features of the Blur platform is the ability to track the price and buy NFTs on several different platforms at once. The project team launched its own NFT aggregator, which provides access to purchase tokens from several sources, such as OpenSea, Rarible, SuperRare and.
The developers have added unique features to the Blur Marketplace that have not been seen on similar marketplaces before:
- Visualization of flor depth — the lower boundary of the price of NFT tokens placed on the marketplace;
- Filtering of floras by certain features;
- Network commission presets when buying or selling NFTs to improve trading efficiency;
- Automatic metadata updates showing new, recently released NFT tokens on the marketplace;
Another feature of the Blur Marketplace is that there is no platform commission. Each purchase or sale by default includes only a 0.5% royalty that buyers pay. However, this commission can be manually reduced to 0, making transactions free of charge, not counting the commission of the network itself.
BLUR token
BLUR is a native management token used to buy and sell NFTs on the Blur marketplace and issued on the Ethereum blockchain (ERC-20). BLUR tokens can be added to liquidity pools on decentralized (DEX) exchanges or can be used to participate in voting for suggestions to improve the platform.
Unlike other NFT marketplaces like OpenSea, the BLUR team decided to release tokens immediately after the main release of the marketplace and hand over the right to manage it to the community.
360 million BLUR tokens were distributed in February 2023 to early marketplace users during an airdrop, a free cryptocurrency giveaway. This airdrop attracted a lot of attention to the platform from the crypto community and was one of the main reasons Blur was so popular. The team allocated more than half of all tokens to the community.
The maximum possible number of BLUR tokens is 3 billion, of which $1.1 billion (67.3%) is already traded on the market. The token was listed on exchanges in February 2023, which was not the most favourable period for the crypto industry. As a result, after the listing, the price of BLUR rose sharply to an all-time high of $45.98 before falling to $0.61 on the same day.
At the time of writing, the token is trading at $0.59 — almost 99% below the all-time high. The BLUR cryptocurrency exchange rate has fallen slightly in more than a year, although most well-known cryptocurrencies have risen over the same period.
Expectations and prospects
Blur already has its ecosystem in place. Just 8 months after launching in May 2023, the Blur team launched its decentralized lending protocol, Blend. The platform allows you to get loans in ETH cryptocurrency by pledging your NFT tokens as collateral. In addition, Blend even will enable you to buy NFTs in instalments.
According to the project roadmap, the team is also planning to launch its own NFT minting (issuance) platform, allowing users to create non-interchangeable tokens without special skills.
Even though Blur's NFT marketplace has existed for just over a year, it has already surpassed all significant marketplaces, such as OpenSea, Gem, X2Y2, Rarible and Looksrare, in terms of trading volume. Meanwhile, Blur is only slightly behind OpenSea regarding daily transactions: 43,974 versus 45,758.
