One by one, cryptocurrency market segments show signs of breaking out of the downtrend. NFTs joined in, too, with a 50% increase in weekly sales to $185 million in 2023. The reason was the expansion of the new Blur marketplace, which is forcing competitors to play by their own rules.

The Blur platform has two modes of operation with NFTs: trader and collector. While the latter is similar to its competitors in many ways, trader mode has many useful innovations. For instance, there's Depth of Market, which shows the number of bids and the price for separate collections. There's also a listing screener that allows tokens to be purchased as soon as they come on the market. Blur is handy for a sweep-the-floor strategy, i.e., buying up the cheapest NFTs from popular collections to resell them later. 

The solutions proved so successful that in the past 30 days, Blur has surpassed the market leader OpenSea by 2.6 times, reaching $1.3 billion.

OpenSea's position was further undermined by the Blur token's zero trading commission policy and airdrop with a listing on 14 February. As a result, OpenSea's market share by transaction volume fell from 36% to 15%, while Blur jumped to 78%.

Since Blur currently only supports Ethereum, increased trading activity has led to an increase from $3 to $6 in the network's average commission in 2023. But it hasn't affected ETH's price. The altcoin has still lagged behind Bitcoin for the past two months.

The emergence of such a strong competitor has forced OpenSea to announce a reduction in its trading fees to zero 'for a limited time only', promote an additional earnings model for artists and introduce some features similar to those offered by Blur.

Unfortunately, increased competition and improved features haven't resulted in the influx of new addresses.

This figure is 40% lower than last year and continues to trend downward. This suggests that there is increased demand for NFTs among experienced users who have switched from one platform to another. Interest from a wider audience remains low.

StormGain Analytical Group 
(platform for trading, exchanging and storing cryptocurrency)