Open war has finally broken out between leading NFT marketplaces.
On Wednesday, upstart NFT marketplace Blur announced it will enforce full royalties to creators for any collection that blocks trading on dominant NFT trading platform OpenSea – a marked escalation of hostility against the rising company’s chief rival.
Blur, like launched last October, does not honor creator royalty settings – meaning the platform does not enforce a fee (typically between 5% and 10%) that NFT creators routinely ask for secondary sales of their works. Currently, the platform only enforces a minimum creator royalty of 0.5%, with the option for traders to pay more.
However, Blur announced today that it will enforce any royalty fee demanded by any NFT project creator – as long as that creator blocks trading of their collections on OpenSea.
In a blog post, Blur’s management framed this policy change as a purely defensive survival tactic, forced by OpenSea’s own non-compete practices.
“Creators who whitelist both OpenSea and Blur should be able to earn royalties on both platforms,” the company said. “Today, OpenSea automatically sets royalties to optional when they detect trades on Blur. We welcome OpenSea to stop this policy so that new collections can earn royalties everywhere.”
Last fall, a number of NFT marketplaces, including Blur, stopped paying royalties to creators, ending a practice that had until then been considered an industry norm. OpenSea flirted with the possibility of following suit, but subsequently withdrew that stance widespread backlash from the NFT environment.
Stuck in a precarious situation $13.3 billion company rolled out a blocking tool that allows creators to ban their NFTs from being traded on any marketplace that didn’t do it glory creates royalties. Collections that chose to use the tool will be guaranteed full enforcement of their own creator fees on OpenSea.
The move was naturally a big hit to Blur’s value proposition to NFT artists: royalty fees can, especially for dominant collections, generate millions of dollars in revenue. And no marketplace has been nearly as critical to the broader Ethereum NFT ecosystem as OpenSea.
Blur clearly hopes or believes that such once-accepted realities may soon change. The marketplace is riding high after dropping the much-anticipated BLUR token on Tuesday. The anticipation of receiving this token, which was handed out as a financial incentive to leave other NFT marketplaces, was largely responsible for propelling Blur to its current position as the most viable threat to OpenSea’s dominance in recent months.
The upstart rival has even topped OpenSea in terms of total Ethereum NFT trade volume recently, although it hosts far more wash trades (or manipulated trades to play its token reward model) than OpenSea. Blur has supposedly been able to do that bypass OpenSea’s blocklist tool the last few weeks.
It’s unclear how long Blur can maintain its current popularity after yesterday’s token launch. But the company is clearly taking advantage of the moment to clap back at its most powerful competitor. After Blur’s announcement, some Twitter users framed the company’s policy change as the inevitable result of OpenSea’s first offensive move last fall against its rivals.
Some championed the move as a long-awaited, serious challenge to OpenSea’s supremacy.
But mostly was simply entertained at the declaration of what appears to be a zero-sum game between two of the NFT ecosystem’s top players.
Stay up to date on crypto news, get daily updates in your inbox.
