Yahoo Autos Are NFT marketplaces becoming an open sea for creator royalties?
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Welcome back to Chain Reaction.
PSA: I’ll be at ETH Denver this week, so if you see me, say hi! I’ll have a few Chain Reaction pins on me and the first few people to find me will get one. Think of it like a free NFT, but instead of it going in your crypto wallet, it’ll go in your wallet, wallet. Woah!
Anyways, let’s get into the news; oh, and Happy March!
February wrapped up as a big month for the NFT market as non-fungible tokens on the Ethereum blockchain surpassed $1.5 billion in volume for the first time since May 2022.
NFT marketplace Blur hit an all-time high for monthly volume at $1.12 billion for February, making up 74.6% of the total volume across all Ethereum NFT marketplaces, according to data from The Block. (The Block’s data aggregation filters out wash trading — when traders buy and sell items between themselves to artificially raise volumes and prices.)
By comparison, OpenSea, now the second-largest Ethereum NFT marketplace, had $270.11 million in volume for February, the data showed. At its peak, OpenSea had about $4.8 billion in monthly volume in January 2022 but has since seen its overall transaction volume deflate.
Amid the recent rebound, Blur has bested the once-largest NFT marketplace OpenSea in monthly volume for the third month in a row as the crypto market debates the issue of NFT creator royalties.
“If you look at what’s been happening recently with OpenSea and Blur, obviously that’s a concern broadly speaking in terms of the market and royalty fights,” Yat Siu, chairman of Animoca Brands, said to TechCrunch. “However, the volume as a result of that has increased tremendously, which means it has brought back another kind of excitement into the space.”
More below.
This week in web3
As mentioned above, the NFT market is getting hot again and the rise of Blur in the NFT market has helped reignite a debate concerning royalties. In previous quarters, OpenSea tried to balance creator royalties as it held the top position for NFT marketplaces, but Blur’s aggressive stance is causing OpenSea to change its tack. But as massive NFT marketplaces drop fees, this could be a “slippery slope” that hurts creators in the long term, Siu said.
