NFT traders bend blur: Here’s who got the most tokens

Rising NFT marketplace Blur held its anticipated BLUR token airdrop this afternoon, and some of the top traders captured more than $1 million worth of tokens at current value. In fact, the top trader got a value of more than $1.9 million Ethereum-based governance tokens.

According to public blockchain data curated by Duneit supreme claimant i BLUR airdrop took home over 3.2 million BLUR tokens, valued at around $1.93 million based on today’s price of around $0.60 per token via CoinGecko.

It’s not immediately clear who has the Ethereum wallet that claimed the massive stash of tokens, but it’s a relatively new wallet created less than three months ago. It has also been incredibly active in the NFT area, trading huge sums of money Mutant Ape Yacht Club and The other side NFTs in the last few days.

A look at trading activity from the wallet shows that the holder has been buying and selling a ton of the same NFTs over and over, suggesting wash trading or at least a coordinated effort to game the Blur trading model. The sale prices are not high enough to raise suspicion, but the assets are turned over with such frequency as to generate huge trading volume.

Interesting, a look at the wallets second highest claimant (2.97 million BLUR, or $1.8 million) and third highest claimant (2.5 million BLUR, or $1.5 million) shows a series of interactions with the top wallet, including back and forth batch sales of various NFTs via Blur.

Again, it points to either laundering trades from one person or group across multiple wallets, or a coordinated effort. As with the top wallet, it’s not immediately clear who owns these wallets – but they’re all intertwined in what appears to be a large-scale and successful attempt to manipulate the Blur airdrop, surely increasing Blur’s marketplace trading volume in the process .

Other top contenders in the Blur airdrop include well-known collectors and social media personalities, including the pseudonym Machi big brother (nearly 1.85 million BLUR, or $1.1 million worth), Keungz (610K BLUR, or $368,000 worth), and big Bored Ape Yacht Club trade Franklin (540K BLUR, or worth $326,000).

Blur offered 360 million BLUR tokens through the airdrop, with the circulating supply giving the token a current market cap of around $217 million. However, it is a relatively small portion of the total BLUR supply, which will apparently amount to 3 billion BLUR when all tokens are released. Almost 260 million of the airdropped tokens have been claimed so far, or about 72%.

BLUR shot as high as $5.02 per token when it first hit the market today, but fell sharply. It is currently down 88% from its short-term peak.