Because of Blur, the amount of money traded in NFT reached $2 billion in February, which was the most since the LUNA crash.
At the end of the day, the fight for market share in the arena of non-fungible tokens (NFT) may be great.
According to the most recent industry analysis from Web3 data platform DappRadar, NFT trading volumes topped $2 billion in February. This was the highest number since before the dramatic crash of Terra and its UST and LUNA tokens in May 2022.
A big reason for the rise is that the no-fee marketplace Blur is becoming more and more popular. From January to February, the number of NFTs sold (the number of tokens that were traded) dropped by about 32%, but the amount of cryptocurrency that was traded (the trading volume) went up by about 120%. Part of this is because transactions were made more likely to happen before Blur’s native token airdrop in the middle of February.
Sara Gherghelas, a blockchain research analyst at DappRadar, says that even though Blur is gaining market share and giving OpenSea a run for its volume traded, the market isn’t getting any new traders. OpenSea is for retail traders, while Blur is for professional traders. Blur’s focus on professional traders may lead to more trading rather than new customers.
Gherghelas said that blur does not lead to adoption. “As of right now, they are just bringing hype with the token launch, but it’s impressive what they’re doing.”
Since its launch in October, Blur has been focusing on traders who want to buy a lot of NFTs without having to pay any fees. It quickly gained popularity because it gave traders a reason to trade on the platform so they could get BLUR, its cryptocurrency, before it came out in February. Two days after the token went live, Blur had more trades than OpenSea, and it has since challenged the main marketplace’s dominance.
The Yuga empire helps in keeping NFTs hot
In February, 30% of the Ethereum-based NFT trading volume came from Blur’s NFT collections. However, DappRadar said that last month, 30% of the Ethereum-based NFT trading volume came from Yuga Labs’ NFT collections. The skill-based Dookey Dash mint made a big difference in this amount. Just this week, the winning key, a non-financial item that you got by getting the best score on the game, sold for $1.6 million.
Yuga Labs customers don’t care if its NFTs have sought-after rare qualities, and its loyal customers will buy whatever Yuga Labs releases to be a part of the larger community the company is building.
She said that Yuga buyers will be excited about TwelveFold, the company’s future Bitcoin NFT series of generative art.
Gherghelas said this is another way for them to control the market. Why Yuga Laboratories felt the need to launch this is strange… This could be an interesting direction for the market to move in the future.
Web3 gaming development
According to the study, Yuga Labs fans jumping into the sewer to play Dookey Dash wasn’t the only sign that blockchain gaming was on the right track. The play-to-earn model, which was popularized by projects like Axie Infinity, fell out of favor in 2022. Web3 gaming projects are now focusing on the metaverse and will be able to make better projects in 2023, thanks to gaming engines like Unity, which released support for SDKs for MetaMask and other decentralized projects.