OpenSea Pro, OpenSea’s newly-launched marketplace aggregator, has taken over Blur as the aggregator with the most users.
Launched on April 5 as a rebrand and expansion of Gem V2, Its daily active user count increased significantly over the week. On Monday, April 3, Blur accounted for 54.8 percent of all NFT aggregator users. But by Saturday, its share had dropped to 27 percent. At the same time, OpenSea Pro’s daily user count surged from 18 percent to 57 percent of aggregator users.
OpenSea Pro’s most notable feature is its live cross-marketplace data, which offers users real-time updates of trending, mints and collection pages across NFT marketplaces.
Other features include improved “floor sweeping” for traders, various NFT collections, inventory control, reduced gas costs for profitable transactions, a watchlist tool, live mints, batch transfer, listings from 170 markets and many more.
All these features are available for users to utilize for optimized NFT transactions for a zero-percent fee.
This marketplace is optimized for mobile devices, which means users can browse, search and list items directly from their mobile phones and computers.
OpenSea Pro’s launch comes at the right time, as the NFT market is slowly making its comeback after losing ground with trading volumes for three consecutive months in 2022. Market-wide data from DappRadar and on-chain data from Dune show NFT sales topped $2 billion in total trading volume, a first since May 2022.
In celebration of the launch, the company announced a new Gemesis NFT drop to reward early users. Any user who purchased an NFT on Gem — which OpenSea acquired in April 2022 — before the end of March can claim a free Gemesis NFT between April 4 and May 4.
There is no indication that the company will follow in the footsteps of Blur’s BLUR by discontinuing its native token. While the company hinted at forthcoming “community rewards,” some users speculate that these may resemble Blur’s previous “Care Packages.”
Read more about the announcement at: https://t.co/8KTUWcTfCH
— OpenSea Pro (@openseapro) April 4, 2023
Competition in the market
Before this release, OpenSea struggled to keep up with Blur.io, which debuted in October 2022. Within months of its launch, the platform overtook OpenSea as the marketplace leader.
According to a series of tweets by Delphi Digital, a crypto research firm, Blur has achieved 53 percent market share by February 2023 with the help of its native token $BLUR airdrops. Its point-based distribution methodology, which rewards users for filling their liquidity pool order book, also played a huge part.
OpenSea announced significant changes to its platform to increase its value, starting by dropping the platform fee to zero percent for a short time. It also offered optional creator earnings for all collections.
However, the changes did not boost the platform a lot. On February 21, Blur had a trading volume of $77.33 million with 42,170 transactions, while OpenSea had 53,340 transactions but much lower volumes of just $14.63 million, per DappRadar.
In the same month, Blur’s trade values surged past OpenSea’s, as the platform facilitated numerous high-value trades with an average NFT price of $1,365, compared to OpenSea’s average of $351.
