Exploring the Opportunities Ahead: A Look at NFT Projects as the BLUR Launch Approaches

As 2023 kicked off, the NFT market gradually recovered. Emerging NFT marketplace Blur announced an airdrop campaign; NFT AMM protocol Sudoswap introduced its governance token SUDO; X2Y2 is also set to restart its airdrop. These bullish developments have provided a much-needed boost for the previously stagnant NFT market, leading to a monthly trading volume of $936 million in January 2023, a new high in nearly seven months.

Thanks to the long-awaited recovery of the NFT sector, the whole market has started buzzing. Aside from the airdrops by Blur, Sudoswap, and X2Y2, what other opportunities should we track? Today, let’s comb through some of the noteworthy projects in the NFT sector.

Emerging NFT marketplaces

As mentioned above, Blur and Sudoswap are two NFT marketplaces that have recently captured the spotlight.

1. Blur (BLUR)

Blur is an NFT marketplace and aggregator designed for professional traders. Although the Blur team is anonymous, its seed round financing was led by Paradigm, a top institutional investor, which gained the project wide market attention soon after its launch. Blur intends to create a better NFT marketplace that allows users to sweep and list across marketplaces, snipe reveals, and manage portfolios faster than anywhere else. Blur charges no fees, granting everyone access to the marketplace, aggregator, and advanced trading tools at zero cost. Besides, Blur encourages traders to respect royalties by offering airdrop incentives. When listing NFTs on Blur, the marketplace automatically defaults to the highest royalty across OpenSea, LooksRare, and X2Y2, and traders can customize the royalties of their listings.

Through three rounds of airdrops and its constantly upgraded functions, Blur has attracted many NFT traders and now ranks among the top 3 NFT marketplaces in terms of trading volume. In addition, the marketplace’s token BLUR will be launched on February 14, and the project plans to allocate most of the tokens to the community, which includes traders, collectors, and creators.

2. Sudoswap (SUDO)

Sudoswap, a simple NFT AMM protocol offering low fees, uses the AMM mechanism and customizable bonding curves to help users buy and sell NFTs directly from a liquidity pool instead of trading with other NFT holders. Liquidity providers (LPs) can deposit assets into single-sided buy or sell pools, or into dual-sided trade pools which buy and sell NFTs with an optional spread to capture trading fees. Meanwhile, traders can buy or sell a batch of NFTs directly from those pools. Compared with other NFT marketplaces, instead of the order book model, Sudoswap uses the more decentralized AMM mechanism, which helps NFT teams deploy liquidity pools. In addition, Sudoswap features low or even zero royalties. This is good for speculators as trading becomes cheaper, but not for creators.

At its inception, Sudoswap saw a surge in popularity through its airdrop campaign. SUDO, the governance token of Sudoswap, is now non-transferable, and for it to become transferable, a governance proposal must be initiated through the standard governance process of the protocol.

NFT trading platforms that attract users from OpenSea by issuing coins

From late 2021 to early 2022, NFT platforms led by OpenDAO attempted to draw users away from OpenSea by airdropping tokens to its users. OpenSea, despite its dominant NFT trading volume, has not provided token rewards for its community. The industry looks forward to more competition in the NFT market, breaking the monopoly of OpenSea and advancing the growth of the NFT sector through competitive dynamics.

1. OpenDAO (SOS)

OpenDAO is an NFT community established by 9x9x9, an NFT collector from the 721Club. In late 2021, the project launched a SOSToken airdrop open to all users who had previously traded on OpenSea. The move created a new paradigm for community airdrops, which has since been modeled by many NFT projects to quickly get through their infancy.

2. LooksRare (LOOKS)

Back in August 2021, LooksRare started preparing to create a community-owned NFT trading platform. Capitalizing on the dissatisfaction that prevailed among OpenSea users in January 2022, the project released its governance token LOOKS and launched an airdrop, giving away 12% of its total supply to OpenSea users. Meanwhile, LooksRare also introduced a trade-driven mining function to attract NFT traders.

3. X2Y2 (X2Y2)

Following the footsteps of LooksRare, X2Y2 also airdropped 120 million X2Y2 tokens, 12% of its total supply, to OpenSea users in February 2022. Moreover, the project launched its NFT marketplace immediately afterward. Aiming to beat OpenSea in terms of user experiences, X2Y2 has rolled out additional functions including bulk listing, batch purchasing, and peer-to-peer transactions, apart from the basic NFT trading functions. Meanwhile, it also offers cheap fees. By Q4 2022, X2Y2 also released its NFT lending platform, which now ranks among the top 3 NFT lending platforms in terms of market share.

Among the aforementioned platforms, since its inception, Blur rapidly overtook X2Y2 in terms of trading volume and registered over $400 million in NFT transactions in just the past two months. On the other hand, SudoSwap, which saw a surge in trading volume upon its launch in July, has since experienced a slowdown.

Regarding unique users, Blur and X2Y2 are neck and neck, while LooksRare lags behind. Meanwhile, SudoSwap, which peaked at 100,000 unique users in August, has been on the decline.

Crypto art NFT platforms

From 2018 to 2020, the NFT market focused on digital art NFTs, and crypto art platforms emerged during the period include SuperRare, Rarible, and KnownOrigin.

1. SuperRare (RARE)

SuperRare is an NFT marketplace that runs on Ethereum and was developed by Pixura, a New York-based studio. Established in 2017 and launched in April 2018, SuperRare aims to build a social NFT marketplace enabling new ways to interact with art, culture, and collectibles. As it evolved over the years, the project has provided mature products, including an art community, an online store, and a magazine. In November 2022, SuperRare’s NFT collector pass RarePass was sold out, bringing in over 3,000 ETH, with RarePass#1 sold at a whopping 138 ETH.

2. Rarible (RARI)

Rarible is also a decentralized NFT marketplace that operates on Ethereum. Founded in late 2019, the project quickly gained a following thanks to its innovative liquidity mining function. In January 2022, Rarible announced the expansion of its Marketplace Builder to the Polygon network, which allows NFT creators to create their unique NFT collections for free and provides them with native tools to aggregate NFTs listed on other secondary markets.

Other NFT marketplaces

1. NFTb (NFTB)

Invested by Binance, NFTb is the first NFT marketplace on the BNB Chain. At the moment, the project offers NFT Marketplace, Farming, Launchpad, and a Gaming segment designed to help users release GameFi NFTs. As the NFT craze continues, NFTb’s token NFTB recorded a fourfold surge on January 30, outpacing other cryptos in the category.

2. NFTrade (NFTD)

NFTrade is a multi-chain NFT marketplace, platform, and indexer that offers a decentralized and non-custodial solution for all NFT interactions. In March 2022, the BNB Chain Fund announced a strategic acquisition of the NFTrade Token (NFTD) to facilitate its continued growth within the BNB ecosystem. NFTrade is now integrated with seven blockchain networks, including Ethereum, Binance Chain, Polygon, Avalanche, ImmutableX, Moonbeam, and SKALE.

NFT lending protocols

Like NFT trading platforms/protocols, NFT lending agreements are also a major infrastructure for the NFT sector. They play an indispensable role in improving the liquidity and capital efficiency of NFT assets.

1. BendDAO (BEND)

BendDAO is a Peer-to-Pool NFT liquidity protocol similar to Aave. Its platform features instant NFT-backed loans, collateral listing, and NFT down payments. Right now, BendDAO’s NFT pool supports eight NFT collateral, including BAYC, CryptoPunks, MAYC, Azuki, Moonbirds, Doodles, Space Doodles, and Clone X. At first, the project employed a 48-hour liquidation protection mechanism. However, following the bank run it suffered in 2022, the BendDAO community voted to reduce the lock-in period for bidders to four hours.

2. JPEG’d (JPEG)

JPEG’d, also a Peer-to-Pool NFT liquidity protocol, resembles MakerDAO. It allows users to collateralize NFTs to obtain pUSD (the protocol’s native stablecoin) or pETH (an Ethereum derivative). At the moment, the protocol’s NFT pool supports 11 NFT collateral, with a 2% interest rate for borrowing pUSD and 5% for borrowing pETH. Moreover, JPEG’d DAO ranks among the top 10 holders of CVX, which allows it to use its voting power to earn CRV and CVX rewards from Curve Finance and Convex Finance as the earnings of JPEG’d pools.

Conclusion

As an emerging project, Blur has established itself as a formidable player in the NFT sector, securing one third of the market share in just several months. There are even signs that it may overtake OpenSea. Furthermore, the BLUR airdrop has brought hope to NFT traders. Despite the challenges presented by the crypto bear, many innovative, promising NFT projects are creating new opportunities, which may lead to another NFT boom, as the market conditions improve.

All crypto assets mentioned above are available in CoinEx’s NFT / NFTFi segment (no financial advice).