X2Y2 Blocks Blur's Access to Its Listings

X2Y2 is blocking Blur — an up-and-coming NFT marketplace competitor — from using X2Y2’s listings on its site.

X2Y2 says Blur applied for more than 10 API keys, violating its terms of service, according to a tweet Wednesday morning. 

“We believe marketplaces and aggregators serve very different purposes and should be separated. Aggregators aggregate listings from different (marketplaces). But when a (marketplace) has its own aggregator it creates a conflict of interest,” said X2Y2, in a subsequent thread.

Blur, which launched Oct. 19 with airdropped, unopenable “care packages,” teased another airdrop for January, giving “loyalty score” increases to users who undercut other marketplaces with listings on Blur. Users can view other marketplace prices on the Blur site, similar to marketplace aggregators Gem and Genie — alongside Blur listings.

“That’s exactly what Amazon did in Web 2. They white-labeled products that performed well and gave Amazon-branded products priority in their listing. We think this dynamic is unhealthy and could be detrimental to the web 3 space in the long term,” X2Y2 tweeted.

Blur has not commented on the block as of Wednesday at 10:45 a.m. ET on its Twitter or Discord. Attempts to reach Blur co-founder Pacman were not successful, but Pacman said on Ryan Carson’s daily Twitter Spaces called “Daily Dose” on Wednesday, that he is still processing the statement from X2Y2 and developing the company’s position. Pacman said he had a call with X2Y2’s CEO last night to “sort out a solution that works for everyone,” then woke up and saw the tweet.

“Ultimately for us, our primary goal is to build the best solution that we can for end traders,” Pacman said on Carson's Spaces. “They did give us a key and we're very comfortable on our position that we're not violating their terms of service but ultimately I think is something that's like still in the works. Like we're happy to work with them to come up with the solution. You know ultimately I think us working together is better for the community is better than us like fighting.”

The normally active X2Y2 tab on the Blur.io site was grayed out with a message saying “LISTING ON X2Y2 TEMPORARILY DISABLED.”

X2Y2’s terms of service prohibit users from “attempting to circumvent any rate limiting systems by using multiple API keys, or obfuscating the source of traffic you send to X2Y2.”

Application programming interface (API) keys, are like membership cards for data, which a company usually grants to interested parties (sometimes for a fee) provided their infrastructure can handle the request.

Data providers can limit the frequency of the party’s request or outright block them, as X2Y2 has done.