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.
San Francisco-based Blur’s rapid ascent has stunned industry experts because it was able to overtake New York-based OpenSea, despite unsuccessful attempts by other well-funded startups. OpenSea came to dominate the NFT market in the summer of 2021 and even as a flurry of competitors arrived, OpenSea held aboutat the end of 2022. Its 2.5% transaction fees helped it rake in $472 million in revenue 2022 from $18.8 billion in trading volume, according to Dapp Radar.
In 2018, during his junior year, Liu met Roquerre at a mutual friend’s tea party, an excuse for MIT students interested in forming startups to meet each other on campus. “We were both pretty intentional about this cofounder dating stage,” says Liu. It’s a stark departure from the pre-Blur era, where traders looking to sell high volumes of NFTs had to list them individually on OpenSea. “It was so painful,” says Ovie Faruq, co-founder and artist at NFT collection Rektguyz, who is also a prominent NFT trader.To keep costs low for these traders, Blur launched with a controversial tactic: it made royalty payments to artists optional. With OpenSea and other marketplaces, NFT creators typically were entitled to earn royalties–often as much as 2.
Why the fuck would anybody still fall for this grift