Metaversal is a Bankless newsletter for weekly level-ups on NFTs, virtual worlds, & collectibles
Dear Bankless Nation,
You used to only be able to buy and sell NFTs one at a time.
That’s why the arrival of NFT marketplace aggregators, where you can do bulk buys or sells, have been a UX gamechanger in crypto.
It’s why OpenSea and Uniswap acquired the Gem and Genie NFT aggregators respectively earlier this year — these sorts of platforms point the way to the future of the digital economy!
All that said, there’s a new NFT aggregator called Blur that you should take note of.
Blur is currently in a private beta, but it’s opening up to everyone soon and is set to release its own native $BLUR token. I’ve tried the platform via early access, so let’s walk through what you can expect from the project once opens up in the near future!
-WMP
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Blur is an NFT marketplace built in an effort to be the “best NFT marketplace for pro traders.”
In March 2022, Blur announced an $11M seed round led by Paradigm. At the time, the team declared their raison d’être:
“Current NFT marketplaces prioritize the retail experience, but they neglect the growing needs of pro traders. Infrastructure has failed to keep up as monthly trading volumes hit billions, and web2 business models hold the space back with poorly aligned incentives. Our mission is to solve these problems and move the NFT space toward becoming institutional grade while increasing decentralization.
This will not be an easy feat, but we’ve assembled a team of builders with experience from MIT, Five Rings, Brex, Square, and Y Combinator to accomplish this mission. We’ve built spot exchanges, marketplaces, and created financial products used by millions. We’re leveraging this hard-earned experience to create infrastructure that can unlock the massive potential of the NFT market.”
Since March, the platform has been both allowlisting holders of other NFT collections (I received early access through being a Blitmap/Blitnaut community member, for example) and using a waitlist scoreboard system to let new users in ahead of its public launch, which is “coming soon.”
Blur is going all-in on real-time NFT listings and activity data.
This speed can lead to you seeing opportunities faster than you would on other NFT platforms. For example, Blur’s emphasis on NFT indexing can help you find rares post-reveal before you can even refresh the metadata on some other marketplaces.
Pretty cool right? Beyond the speed, you can also sweep NFTs on Blur with bulk buys, and you can bulk list and delist your NFTs through the Portfolio dashboard as needed — whatever your NFT trading setup requires.
Let’s say you’re looking to buy. You simply scroll or use the Blur search bar to find your collection of choice, at which point you’ll be brought to the project’s dedicated trading page like you can see in the example image above.
The collection page which shows you all kinds of relevant info like historical floor prices, floor depth, volume stats, listing activity, attribute details, and more.
The Blur team just teased that a $BLUR token is incoming, as you can see from the tweet above.
For now, it’s not known whether the token is only going to be airdropped to the project’s early users, though in my opinion it seems more likely the project could opt for a x2y2-like approach where tokens are airdropped to users with a history of NFT activity in general, e.g. OpenSea trades.
This strategy would bring in an influx of new users, but it remains to be seen if Blur will go this route. Either way, $BLUR may be hotly traded once it first launches, so keep an eye out on Blur updates going forward!
William M. Peaster is a professional writer and creator of Metaversal—a Bankless newsletter focused on the emergence of NFTs in the cryptoeconomy. He’s also recently been contributing content to Bankless, JPG, and beyond!
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Not financial or tax advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research.
Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here.
