Competition in any market is a welcome catalyst for innovation, but Blur is going further to take market share from its rival OpenSea. According to the company, it will promise to enforce royalties for content creators, under the condition that they block all of their collections from being traded on OpenSea.
The announcement itself comes after the successful launch of its own token – $BLUR – which was airdropped to its community this month. This promise by Blur is not surprising since it was largely considered a retaliatory move based on what it described as ‘non-competitive practices’ from OpenSea – specifically from its approach to royalties.
For added context, Blur is one of the NFT marketplaces that has really caused the competition between markets to spike. Specifically, the company’s flexible approach to royalty fees, which OpenSea was forced into following its previous decision, which sparked outrage from creators.
In addition to this OpenSea’s filtering tool caused a negative stir as well, due to it allowing creators to block their collections from specific marketplaces, particularly ones that didn’t honour royalty payments.
During a blog post, Blur highlights that its incentives for creators to block trades on OpenSea come from its somewhat protectionist approach to honouring royalties; stating that, while creators can whitelist both platforms, OpenSea sets royalties to optional when trades are detected on Blur.
While it’s a moral stance that Blur takes in requesting that OpenSea ends this policy, it comes off as somewhat hollow, considering that Blur doesn’t offer full royalties either. As it stands, it only offers 0.5% royalties as a minimum, with higher royalties being an option at the discretion of the user.