Blur Surpassed OpenSea in Daily NFT Trading Volume Wednesday, Nansen Shows

On Wednesday, Feb. 15, non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace Blur overtook OpenSea in daily Ethereum trading volume, according to data analytics platform Nansen.ai.

Other data aggregators point to Blur's steady rise over the past month. A Dune dashboard created by data scientist Hildebert Moulié shows Blur's daily trading volume more than quadrupled following Blur’s release of a native token the day before, a move that has helped push the competition between the two NFT marketplaces to a new level.

The trading volume on Blur’s marketplace stood at 6,602 ether (ETH) Wednesday and OpenSea’s trading volume stood at 5,649 ETH, per Nansen. Meanwhile, another Dune dashboard created by sealaunch.xyz posts higher daily trading volume figures for both Blur and OpenSea – 30,410 ETH and 7,232 ETH, respectively – showing a greater disparity between the two marketplaces, compared to Nansen's data.

Blur’s surge in daily trading volume also followed a blog post from Blur recommending creators block NFT listings on OpenSea as a means of collecting full royalties on Blur’s zero-fee marketplace. Currently, conflicting rules bar artists from simultaneously earning royalties on OpenSea and Blur.

Blur gains on OpenSea

OpenSea’s trading volume per week has always been several times higher than Blur’s trading volume, and in the most recent week, OpenSea’s weekly volume stood at 36,608 ETH, while Blur’s weekly volume sat at 11,424 ETH, per Nansen.

Moulié's Dune dashboard, on the other hand, indicates that Blur has led OpenSea in weekly trading volume since Dec. 2022, except for one week in Jan. 2023.

Another important metric to note is the number of sales and wallets on OpenSea is still greater than on Blur.

From Feb. 7 to Feb. 14, the number of sales on OpenSea was, on average, 8.37 times larger than the number of sales on Blur, while the number of wallets on OpenSea was roughly eight times greater than the number of wallets on Blur, per Nansen.

The gap between OpenSea and Blur in terms of the number of sales and wallets has been closing and was at its smallest as of Wednesday. That day the number of sales on OpenSea stood at 19,908 – 1.63 times greater than Blur’s total number of sales, 12,185.

See Also: NFT Marketplace Blur's Token Reaches $500M Trading Volume After Airdrop

When looking at the number of wallets active on the two marketplaces, an analogous trend arises: The number of wallets interacting with OpenSea is now only twice as great as those interacting with Blur, showing how the race between the first- and second-largest marketplaces is tightening.

UPDATE (Feb. 18, 2023 12:14 a.m. EST): Added references to additional data dashboards from Dune Analytics regarding the daily and weekly trading volume of Blur and OpenSea throughout.