In February, the NFT market sales volume set an all-time high for the last nine months. This is due to the hype around the marketplace Blur.
The NFT sales volume was 117% higher in February 2023 than the month before. The total trading volume exceeded $2.04 billion, the highest since May 2022. However, sales totals dropped by 31.46% to 6.3 million, according to a DappRadar report.
Analysts say Ethereum has maintained its dominance in the NFT market, occupying 83.36%. Among other blockchain networks in this segment, Polygon (147%) and Immutable X (71%) showed significant growth.
Overall, the NFT market growth was driven by the hype around the Blur platform, which took 64.8% of total sales during the month, pushing back NFT marketplace OpenSea, the longtime segment leader. The third and fourth places in trading volumes, with a considerable lag, are taken by platforms X2Y2 and LooksRare.
Analysts point out that Blur’s trading model differs from traditional ones and has some features of fictitious trading. For example, representatives of the CryptoSlam service noted that 80.5% of the trading volume on Blur is “wash trading.” According to their data, the same figure for OpenSea is only 2.3%. Besides, OpenSea still has more active users — 316,199 compared to Blur’s 96,856.
Recall that the standoff between OpenSea and Blur started in mid-February when the trading volume on OpenSea began to fall against the background of Blur’s growth.
