Will OpenSea be Successful in Reclaiming Dominance Once Again?

Emerging NFT market Blur may have sparked an open battle against the former market leader, but the latter seems to be making a comeback, albeit slowly.

According to Dune Analytics data compiled by sealaunch.xyz, the percentage of unique users on OpenSea has increased since it plunged in mid-February.

Simultaneously, it was found that there was a significant decrease in the average size of sales per user on Blur after the airdrop. Since the event, the trading volume of major collections such as CryptoPunks, BAYC, Otherdeed, MAYC, Meebits, Moonbirds, CloneX, and Doodles has declined on Blur and instead increased on OpenSea.

BLUR, the governance token, was airdropped to users last week. The tokens have even accumulated over $1 billion in trading volume.

1/ Since @blur_io airdrop, @opensea seems to be regaining market share in volume (at a slow pace).

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Check the @DuneAnalytics dashboard here
📊 https://t.co/SUjGKFMxRg pic.twitter.com/v2cDi88CVX

— sealaunch.xyz (@SeaLaunch_) March 3, 2023

Blur against OpenSea

As part of its takeover strategy, Blur updated its royalty policy which stated that NFT creators could not earn royalties simultaneously on Blur and OpenSea. When it launched in November, Blur refrained from imposing full royalties – it did not impose any fees that creators collect on secondary sales of their digital collectibles. Rather, it was up to buyers to choose whether or not to honor an artist’s royalty policy. However, this was later extended to royalties with a minimum of 0.5%.

OpenSea would have needed new collections to prevent Blur from receiving imposed royalties. The latter then tried to escape this blacklist by developing a new marketplace on OpenSea’s Seaport protocol. The objective was to allow creators to be able to collect all royalties on both platforms.

Last November, OpenSea unveiled collections that demanded imposed royalties that must block markets that don’t fully honor them.

NFT’s sales volume skyrocketed in February of this year, reaching levels not seen since the Terra implosion. The vagueness mainly contributed to the surge. He outmoded OpenSea in transaction volume.

Market manipulation allegations

Blur’s trading volume topped $1 billion in February. Even though the numbers have since declined, the volume was reportedly generated by a small number of whales flipping NFTs back and forth to accumulate BLUR tokens through the company’s incentive program.

Cryptoslam, a leading platform for tracking NFT sales, said it would remove $577 million in Blur transactions from its data citing “market manipulation.”

He further revealed that 80.5% of Blur’s sales volume since February 14 has been wash trades. On the contrary, only 2.6% of OpenSea’s sales volume were fictitious transactions during this same period.