State of Blur's Bidding Pool

Blur’s bidding pool currently has a total value locked (TVL) of $68M as of August 21st, as the pool continues to decline alongside BLUR’s token price. The total ETH deposited into Blur had plateaued since mid-April before nosediving in August as BLUR’s price plummeted. The BLUR token has been on a straight decline, from $0.7 on April 15th to $0.22 on August 1st, a whopping 68.6% drop.

This is likely due to token dilution from token emissions and the lack of utility at present, aside from governance. Further, farmers have made a net loss providing bid-side liquidity in a dwindling market while the 300M+ BLUR tokens allocated for Season 2 continue to shrink in dollar terms.

The situation does not look good. Notable whales are removing their bids, there is no clear sign of Season 2 ending, and there are no new buyers in the NFT market.

Are there any implications for challenger platforms? LooksRare & x2y2 are the next closest ones with a token (OpenSea obv not in that group).

X2y2 strikes me as having the closest products (marketplace & lending).

Granted, the market is just bad but who‘s able to profit from Blur‘s struggles?

Great question! I think its not comparable - in a sense Blur is dominating with a huge lead (in both marketplace & lending of >50% overall market share), while X2Y2 and LooksRare only consist less than 5% of market share. I think liquidity is just leaving NFTs as a whole here. Challengers are not beneficiaries but rather they're just feeling the aftermath of likely a buyer capitualtion type event

Do you think there is anyway Blur can recover? Maybe by giving the token utility or slowing dilution or smt. Seems like the heavy dilution through rewards is coming back to haunt them.

Short-term wise, I think something like a Binance listing will be able to bring some excitement back and lead to some upside. But you're right, token inflation is vvv high in the first year + incoming airdrop 2 which farmers already suffered heavy losses from farming. Blur will recover one day, but a good guess is between 9-12 months from now in my opinion.