Introduction

Over the past eight months, OpenSea, the once-dominant leader in the NFT marketplace realm, has found itself in a challenging situation. This predicament unfolded when Blur — an NFT marketplace and aggregator — emerged onto the scene in October last year, diverting a significant amount of trading volume away from OpenSea and disrupting its previously unchallenged position of dominance.

The NFT marketplace war is not a new phenomenon either. Marketplaces like LooksRare and X2Y2 previously emerged with aspirations to challenge OpenSea’s dominance but struggled to maintain their initial momentum following their respective airdrops.

In a similar vein, Blur adopted a comparable strategy and executed a token airdrop for BLUR in February this year, albeit with different incentivization mechanics than its predecessors. As a result, a new marketplace has finally managed to overtake OpenSea in terms of trading volume, and OpenSea’s longstanding dominance has now been broken for the first time.

Blur’s Differentiation

One significant distinction between OpenSea and Blur lies in their target audiences. OpenSea aims to cater to a broad user base, while Blur strategically targeted professional whale traders as the key to challenging OpenSea’s dominance. This unique approach is reflected in Blur’s efforts to foster platform loyalty. To incentivize trading, Blur introduced a highly anticipated airdrop that rewarded traders for bidding on NFTs near their floor price.

By doing so, traders earned bidding points which were later converted into BLUR tokens. Furthermore, Blur emphasized loyalty in NFT listings. Traders who exclusively listed their NFTs on Blur received 100% of their designated loyalty points, while those who listed elsewhere received a discounted rate.

Further, the introduction of Blend, an oracle-less perpetual NFT lending protocol, solidifies their intentions to financialize the NFT market. Here, loans have no predetermined end date and borrowers can maintain their positions indefinitely with a market-determined interest rate until they are no longer able to repay their loans and default.

Goliath Fights Back

Allow us to reintroduce ourselves 📣

Starting today, Gem V2, the best-in-class NFT aggregator, is now OpenSea Pro!

💎➡️⛵️

OpenSea Pro will still be run by the same Gem team you know & love, but with unified brands we are able to offer users MUCH more

Let's dive in 👇🏽🧵 pic.twitter.com/pyt6QnjW7b

— OpenSea Pro (@openseapro) April 4, 2023

Amidst this competitive landscape, OpenSea responded to Blur’s incursion by launching OpenSea Pro (OS Pro), a marketplace and aggregator that caters specifically to professional traders. Similar to Blur, it offers 0% marketplace fees that enforce creator royalties at a minimum of