This week, more than $4 million worth of Ethereum has been burned (or destroyed) as a result of Blur, a new NFT marketplace, giving away tokens.
On Valentine’s Day, the token was given out for free to Blur users who had exchanged a great deal of Ethereum NFTs on the market over the previous six months.
Initially, the price was as high as $5, but within less than an hour, it dropped below $1. At its present price of $0.90, the BLUR coin is 82% lower than its launch day peak.
Ultra Sound Money reports that Blur has burned more than 2,469 Ethereum to date. With the August 2021 London hard fork, a portion of the transaction fees formerly paid to miners are now burnt and removed from circulation.
The majority of this sum, approximately 1,158 ETH, appears to be attributable to individuals claiming their airdrops. The remaining activity consists of BLUR token transfers and actions on the Blur marketplace itself.
There could be additional pyrotechnics falling from the sky.
At the time of writing, over 100,000 wallets had claimed 92.5% of the free tokens that were distributed.
Blur joins the chat
Blur has recently captured a significant portion of the whole NFT market.
According to Dune, Blur has more than 43 percent of the weekly volume, OpenSea has 37.1 percent, and X2Y2 has only 9.9 percent.
While OpenSea was at its peak in January, it accounted for almost 95% of the sector’s weekly volume.
OpenSea is the more well-known of the two largest NFT marketplaces, but this week’s airdrop by Blur appears to have weakened OpenSea’s position.
The newcomer announced on Wednesday that it would charge authors any requested royalty fee so long as such creators prevented the trading of their collections on OpenSea. There was a clear indication that the newcomer’s anger towards the rival was growing.
Blur, which was released in October of last year, does not respect creator royalty settings to their full extent. This indicates that the platform does not enforce the 5% to 10% charge that NFT producers might demand on secondary sales of their works.
Currently, the site demands only a 0.5% minimum creator royalty, but merchants can pay more if they so choose.
Cover Image Source: decrypt.co
