New NFT Marketplace Blur Is Courting Professional JPEG Traders With an Airdrop and No Trading Fees

A buzzy new non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace has entered the arena, offering zero trading fees and an airdrop of its native token to JPEG collectors who have kept trading despite the bear market.

Blur, an Ethereum-based platform, launched a beta version on Wednesday with over $14 million of backing from venture-capital giant Paradigm, NFT-native investment fund 6529, digital art collector Cozomo Medici and others.

The platform is targeting “professional” NFT traders with features like “floor sweeping” across multiple marketplaces, reveal “sniping” and portfolio analytics tools, along with a future airdrop of its BLUR token to anyone who has traded Ethereum-based NFTs in the last six months.

To claim the airdrop, users must list one of their NFTs on the marketplace, which grants them access to “care packages” that can be redeemed for tokens in the future.

“Care packages can be opened for BLUR tokens when we launch our token and protocol governance in January,” the company said in an announcement. “This is just our first step towards making Blur a marketplace that the entire NFT community can own and profit from.”

While the marketplace follows the recent trend of optional royalties in a bid to attract users, it has also created a rewards program that incentivizes users to pay royalties in exchange for more BLUR tokens.

The royalty debate has been the center of attention in the NFT industry the past few weeks, ignited most recently by Magic Eden, the top marketplace on the Solana blockchain, moving to a royalty-optional model.

Blur, like Magic Eden, has also put a temporary pause on its marketplace fee.

It’s not the first marketplace to strive for market share by using an airdrop and extensive tokenomics – LooksRare and its $LOOKS token was the first platform to popularize the strategy and remains a strong competitor. In addition, Rarible’s recent Rarible 2 update has introduced new incentives to buy and sell its RARI token and participate in its expanding ecosystem, alongside airdropped rewards.

(Disclosure: the author of this post claimed a modest Blur airdrop of five care packages.)

This article was originally published on Oct 21, 2022 at 5:12 p.m. UTC

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