As the NFT buying frenzy has subsided over the past year, a new trader-focused NFT marketplace quietly dethroned OpenSea as market leader.the 24 year old cofounder of NFT trading firm, Blur, is reminiscing about the Vestaboard hanging on the wall in his home office, remembering how just a few months ago the incessant clicking emanating from it was deafening.
In the last six months, Roquerre, and co-founder Anthony Liu, who until recently was known only by his online name “Galaga,” have built the largest marketplace by trading volume for NFTs, unseating market leader OpenSea, which secured a valuation of $13.3 billion in January 2022, turning its cofounders Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah into the. In March, tiny Blur, which has a staff of only 10, recorded $1 billion in trading volume, compared to OpenSea’s $260 million.
Blur’s alternative model and sudden emergence has shaken the entire NFT ecosystem, prompting many participants to question audience targeting, creator royalties and NFT utility.managers in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Roquerre’s affinity for working at tech startups started in 2013, when he was 15 and landed a software engineering summer job with fast-growing t-shirt startup Teespring.
By May of that year, Liu graduated with a degree in computer science, Roquerre decided to drop out of MIT to join him in creating a blockchain startup called Namebase. Namebase operates a marketplace for blockchain-based domain names. After three yearsDuring 2021’s explosion in interest in NFTs, Roquerre started collecting and trading digital artwork, but became frustrated with the services available for traders.
“Blur said, ‘I don't care about the art. I want to make an exchange where people can make a market for these pieces, and I don't really even care what they look like. I'm just going to trade it,’” says Shane Cutra, a former trader at the Chicago Board Options Exchange who is now retired and trades NFTs. Cutra, 53, says he’s made about $400,000 trading NFTs since he started trading in December 2020.