• OpenSea, the leading NFT marketplace, announced that it would temporarily waive its marketplace fee in order to compete with zero-fee platform Blur.
• The competition between OpenSea and Blur has intensified since Blur’s native token was launched on Tuesday.
• Despite the day loss to Blur, OpenSea had an average of 8.37 times more sales than Blur over the past week.
OpenSea Waives Fees for Limited Time
OpenSea, the leading NFT marketplace, announced in a Tweet on Feb. 17 that it would be adopting a controversial move to temporarily waive its marketplace fee in order to compete with zero-fee platform Blur. This is part of an ongoing battle for market share between these two platforms.
Changes at OpenSea
The changes at OpenSea include a temporary 0% marketplace fee, default on all collections without on-chain royalty enforcement and optional creator royalties starting at 0.5%. Additionally, OpenSea will revise its blocklist of other marketplaces that fail to honor full royalty payments to creators, now permitting sales on NFT marketplaces with similar policies including Blur.
Blur’s Native Token Launch
BLUR is currently ranked by CoinMarketCap as #117 of all cryptos and had a 24-hour trading volume of $509 million shortly after the token’s launch on Feb 14th 2021 at $5 per coin; it is now trading around $1 mark per coin. On Feb 15th 2021, Blur passed OpenSea in trading volume for the first time since its inception in October 2020.
Competition Heats Up
Despite this day loss to Blur, OpeaSea’s weekly volume was much higher according to recent data from Nansen – 36608 ETH compared to 11 424 ETH for Blur over the same period (Feb 7 – 14). This means that during this period OpenSea had an average of 8.37 times more sales than their main competitor – Blur.
Conclusion
The cut throat competition across the NFT space has forced platforms such as Open Sea into making drastic changes like waiving fees temporarily in order to remain competitive and maintain their user base – something that could potentially have long term implications for both platforms involved!