The NFT ecosystem is bracing for affect. In a number of quick weeks, the wildly profitable and controversial NFT market and aggregator Blur will finish its Season 2 factors incomes season, with large payouts of its native token, $BLUR, anticipated to land within the fingers of its most loyal and energetic customers. 

Rewarding customers for participation is an efficient factor in idea, an idea that actually aligns with Web3 ideas of all boats rising within the tide. However Blur’s technique of leaning into the NFT pro-trader demographic by alluring them with staggered token rewards may backfire spectacularly for the platform — and have a profound ripple impact on the remainder of the NFT sphere as nicely. Is Blur backing itself right into a nook? 

Success in jeopardy 

When Blur got here onto the scene in October 2022, it quickly turned the highest NFT market by quantity, dethroning OpenSea, the reigning market champion of the previous six years. That success solely turned extra acute after Blur launched $BLUR, its native ERC-20 governance token, on February 14, whose worth on the time of writing is hovering round $0.80. 

The token launch marked the tip of Season 1 of Blur’s token reward system for its customers. The airdrop payouts had been substantial; in accordance to some estimates, 34 wallets acquired over 500,000 tokens, with one other 23 incomes over 1,000,000 $BLUR. 

Massive Recipients:

The $BLUR airdrop was based mostly upon Blur buying and selling quantity, and due to this fact massive NFT merchants benefitted enormously from migrating over from Opensea.

34 wallets acquired over 500K $BLUR, and 23 acquired over 1M!

(h/t @pandajackson42, try @jconorgrogan‘s publish too!) https://t.co/kTsXcDAoSR

— Arkham (@ArkhamIntel) February 15, 2023

The aftermath of $BLUR’s launch noticed exercise on {the marketplace} surge much more than it had performed beforehand; by way of weekly buying and selling quantity, the platform has outperformed OpenSea by as a lot as $417 million and as little as $97 million between February 20 and April 10, in accordance with Dune Analytics. February 14 additionally marked the start of Season 2’s token reward period, which was scheduled to finish on April 1 however was delayed till the start of Might. 

Whereas saying the delay, Blur additionally revealed that it could lengthen its double-points rewarding system for customers who bid on NFTs on the platform till Season 2 concluded, additional incentivizing customers to maintain its quantity numbers nicely above that of its largest opponents. Customers who bid extra typically accumulate larger factors, resulting in a much bigger airdrop on the finish of the season.

However cracks in Blur’s high-performing armor have begun to disclose themselves. Ever for the reason that market’s rise to dominance, vital swaths of the NFT neighborhood have pointed to the uncomfortable undeniable fact that simply a handful of Blur’s largest merchants can sway the ground costs of complete NFT collections as they stumble over one another to token farm. Initiatives starting from the largest PFP collections in existence to some extremely sought-after superb artwork NFTs equivalent to Artwork Blocks tasks, instantly discovered their pricing more and more tied to large-scale and lightning-fast buying and selling motion by the hands of some versus Web3 neighborhood sentiment and natural worth motion. 

Pacman (Tieshun Roquerre), Blur’s co-founder, has argued that this sort of exercise is typical of conventional finance and that the motion of the NFT ecosystem’s largest market makers — like Franklin and Machi Huge Brother, two legends within the NFT pro-trader sphere — is simply basically going to look totally different than what Web3 is used to.

In the end, Roquerre claims Blur’s success is sweet for the NFT house. However not everyone seems to be satisfied of that declare’s legitimacy, together with a number of the neighborhood’s largest and most well-known and revered names, nor of the premise that Web3 must be a spot that replicates each facet of conventional finance. 

Other than the controversy surrounding Blur’s technique is the potential for the platform’s token farming-supported quantity motion to drop on Might 1, when Blur’s double factors reward system involves an finish. Whereas the platform has not revealed what it should do past this date to proceed incentivizing exercise on its platform, some are speculating that Blur is unlikely to proceed doubling its level reward system for bidders or improve it past the present fee. This might result in a sudden drop in exercise on the platform, leading to flooring costs which were influenced by {the marketplace}’s buying and selling motion to likewise take successful. 

This floor-supporting dynamic is strengthened by Blur’s factors reward mechanism: bids positioned on the platform which are nearer to a group’s flooring worth lead to a better quantity of rewards for the person. Take away (or decrease) the motivation for Blur’s market-influencing professional merchants to proceed to prop up that flooring, and the consequence may spell a fall for these collections. 

Blur’s large merchants bow out

Some of the worrying alerts for Blur (and for the collections whose flooring costs are being propped up by this sort of buying and selling) is that its most distinguished gamers have bowed out after realizing hundreds of ETH in losses whereas token farming on the platform. 

Franklin (who has now deactivated his Twitter) and Machi Huge Brother lately pulled again from the platform and NFT buying and selling generally in a considerably dramatic vogue and at the very least partly for the losses incurred. Franklin’s losses from his exercise on Blur whole within the above 500 ETH vary, whereas Machi Huge Brother has reportedly misplaced roughly 5,000 ETH from his trades. Blur merchants hope {that a} future token airdrop might help offset the losses they’ve incurred by buying and selling on the platform, however doing so would require a large payout from {the marketplace}. In Machi’s unlucky case, he’d have to earn hundreds of thousands of $BLUR tokens to offset his losses.

Franklin’s departure (and Machi’s present ambiguous perspective towards NFT buying and selling) has already been felt out there. Bored Ape Yacht Membership’s flooring worth fell from roughly 58 to 52 ETH after Franklin hurriedly offered dozens of Apes to repay loans from BendDAO, a service that lets customers put up NFTs as collateral for ETH loans, and to get well from hundreds of ETHs value of losses from a rug pull rip-off. However that market impact might be a tiny drop within the bucket in comparison with what may occur if Blur’s merchants don’t really feel the necessity to stick round. 

Bracing for affect

All informed, each Blur merchants and the NFT ecosystem at massive are tensing up as they method the platform’s Might 1 deadline. Assuming that Blur can not preserve the present state of its double-rewards factors incomes system, there look like few constructive outcomes for both the platform or its customers who’ve incurred any vital losses by buying and selling on it. 

Even when Blur’s reward system results in its merchants with the ability to cowl their losses sufficient to deem continued use of the platform value their whereas, critical questions relating to this method’s sustainability nonetheless loom massive. A lot relies on what Blur decides to do relating to incentivization strategies for its merchants after Might 1. If issues don’t change, it seems to be like Blur’s daring experiment may find yourself shaking itself aside, ratting the complete Web3 neighborhood within the course of. 

Editor’s be aware: A earlier model of this text acknowledged that Blur would have a token airdrop on Might 1. It has since then been corrected. Nevertheless, the bidding and itemizing factors for Blur’s Season 2 Airdrop will stay doubled till Might 1.