Ascendant NFT marketplace Blur announced on Tuesday that it will soon be handing out around $300 million worth of additional tokens to loyal users in a few days after. overtaking once-untouchable competitor OpenSea as the most popular Ethereum NFT trading platform by trading volume.
Blur will release 300 million of its native BLUR tokens to traders during the platform's "Season 2," which has already begun. According to data, BLUR is currently trading at $0.99 on CoinGecko.
Season 1, which culminated in the debut of its native BLUR token last week, saw Blur provide BLUR “care packages” to traders who migrated to the platform from a competing NFT market, placed NFTs on the platform immediately after its launch in October, or used Blur to bet on NFT.
According to the company, in the second season, the tokens will be distributed to traders in a more fixed game program. Blur customers will be assigned a "loyalty score" based on their engagement with and commitment to the trading platform, while buyers and sellers who refrain from using any other NFT marketplace will receive, for example, a 100% loyalty score.
A user's loyalty score, combined with the number of NFTs they listed, will determine how many BLUR tokens they will ultimately receive in a subsequent airdrop.
Under this new loyalty system, even small actions can potentially increase a user's chances of earning more BLUR. On Tuesday, the company hinted that even citing the Season 2 announcement on Twitter could boost a user's loyalty score.
However, it's unclear what technical mechanisms Blur has in place to link activity on individual platforms, such as Twitter, to metrics on its site. The company did not immediately respond to Decipher's request for clarification.
Tuesday's announcement marks the latest escalation in the all-out war that has erupted between NFT platforms to attract and retain customers. The $13.3 billion behemoth OpenSea, long considered Ethereum's single dominant NFT market, has been switching users to Blur in recent months, largely due to the latter's lucrative token incentive program. Both companies offer bonuses to users who block the other.
Last week, likely due to Blur's explosive growth and lack of fees in the marketplace, OpenSea waived its own 2.5% fee—the company's main source of revenue—for a "limited time." It also reduced the copyright protections that were once a feature of the NFT model, which previously guaranteed creators royalties—typically 5-10%—on secondary sales of NFTs. Through such royalties, NFT projects receive a steady income after the initial drop or sale.
While the sustainability of Blur's aggressive incentive program is unknown, its immediate impact on competitors such as OpenSea will almost certainly reinforce current trends.
While Blur currently boasts significantly higher trading volumes than OpenSea, most of this activity appears to have been generated by a smaller number of whale traders flipping NFTs into Blur's bounty program to get as much BLUR as possible.
However, the popularity of this rewards program depends on the value of the native Blur token. In the last 24 hours, BLUR has fallen by about 24% from $1.28.