Blur'd Lines: Marketplace Circumvents Restrictions
Blur has bypassed OpenSea's blocklist control, as detailed yesterday in a comprehensive tweet thread by Panda Jackson.
🔙 Back It Up
In November, OpenSea implemented a new policy in which collections requesting royalty enforcement were required to block marketplaces that did not fully honor them. Thus collections with royalty enforcement on OpenSea could not also be traded on Blur.
Creators were put in a bind - picking OpenSea meant that the collections couldn't trade on Blur, and picking Blur meant royalties wouldn't be enforced on OpenSea.
But then Blur found an alternative method, using OpenSea's Seaport (a decentralized web3 marketplace protocol, developed by...OpenSea) to create a new exchange system. Seaport itself was not on OpenSea's blocklist, hence collections blocking Blur became tradeable, through a system with newly enforced royalties.
What It Means
Blur now has two systems to execute trades on its marketplace, the old one that continues to handle collections that don't block it, and a new one that manages collections that were previously blocked. Blur chooses the system automatically, and the user experience is a seamless one.
So previously blocked collections, like Sewer Passes, are now live on Blur.
📊 By the Numbers
Thanks to this helpful infographic from @pandajackson42, we can see that more than 90 percent of trades on OS honored royalties in 2022, while less than 20 percent honored them across other platforms.
Source: https://twitter.com/pandajackson42/status/1620081568575545344?s=20&t=sJqkqgsLpQ7ja1EdCsP4xg
❗ Why It Matters
Given that OpenSea and Blur are by far the two most dominant NFT marketplaces at this time, this will have significant consequences for traders and creators alike, as well as for each respective marketplace.
- For creators: Now receive full royalties on both marketplaces.
- For traders: Now trade on Blur with zero platform fees.
- For Blur: Pull volume share from all collections (even those previously restricted)/
- For OpenSea: Greater Seaport adoption, and ultimately aided in increased adoption of royalty enforcement for the space.
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