Since February 16, the trading volume on the marketplace OpenSea began to fall amid rising rates of Blur. Therefore, the OpenSea team announced a series of benefits for users and NFT creators.
According to Nansen’s on-chain analytics, OpenSea’s trading volume in ETH on February 16 was 32% lower than on the Blur marketplace. So, OpenSea’s performance that day fell by ~10%, while Blur’s trading volume more than doubled.
In light of this, the OpenSea team announced “big changes” on February 17, involving:
- Zero-fee for a limited time.
- Moving to optional NFT creator earnings (0.5% minimum) for all collections, including existing ones.
- Elimination of blocking of other marketplaces by filters.
Such changes on the marketplace are aimed at trying “to revitalize its dominance” in the space. The project team admits that users are leaving for Blur, but argues that this is primarily due to OpenSea’s undervalued approach to protecting NFT creators’ earnings.
The project team claims that Blur’s performance has increased because the platform has introduced a feature to block recommendations from other marketplaces. OpenSea representatives believe this approach forces NFT creators to make a “false choice.”
However, the main reason for the increased trading volume on Blur is the policy of charging royalties. The marketplace allows creators of NFT collections to receive royalty payments when reselling tokens through absolutely any marketplace. While NFT creators on OpenSea can only get royalties for reselling on a single marketplace.
The OpenSea team’s announcement of the upcoming changes drew contradictory feedback from the community. Users say that if the platform “wins back its migrating customers,” the commissions will rise again. Other Twitter users suggest that OpenSea “risks becoming the blockbuster of NFTs” if it achieves dominance by lowering prices instead of improving its functionality.
OpenSea’s market share was down by 25% in 2022 due to an increase in the number of competitors and a global decline in the trading volume in the NFT market.
