BlocksInform
The blockchain intelligence glassnode platform released a report on Wednesday analysing how blurring – the new hotspot for NFT trading – is slowly moving back into the chain non-fungible economy.
The company has noted a 94% increase in non-ether gas consumption over the past 2 months.
The rise of fuzziness.
As the report explained, Ethereum gas fees have become more expensive this month, with the median transaction gas price rising to 38 gwei, compared to roughly 10 to 20 gwei over the previous nine months. Which is higher than the price of gas during the ftx fallout in November (36 gwei) and the following month's binary banking event (24 gwei) – the two events create a strong demand for block space which leads to an increase in transaction costs.
"After further consideration... we can determine that one of the major sources of this growing network business is the NFT market, which is once again showing signs of growth," writes glassnode.
NFTs had a slow 2022, with both trading volumes and floor prices for top collections plummeting, and various analyses revealing that the NFT economy was rife with wash trading. OPENSEA – the longtime king of NFT marketplaces – was forced to lay off 20% of its staff in June due to the bear market and macroeconomic pressures.
Bloodshed has given way to a new NFT market and a fuzzy aggregator to thrive. Launched in October, Blur has already started to dominate 78% of NFT transfer volume using a "zero exchange fee model with optional royalty payments."
Despite the transition to a clean no-cost model as a result of the competition, OpenSea has so far failed to rival Blur's rapid rise. According to Glassnode, this is due to the blur that has attracted a community of professional traders, in contrast to OpenSea's historic public target of "creators and collectors."
Typical Blur users are now running 4-5 trades per day on the platform, compared to the OpenSea average of only 2 trades per user.
"More frequent sales can create a steering wheel effect, as more NFT salespeople feel tuned on the blur platform, creating a broader supply, that in turn attracts more buyers," according to the report.
NFT Adoption
Although the gas measurements seem promising, the overall adoption of the NFt does not appear to be affected by Blur's growth. Data from glassnode shows that growth in new addresses on ethereum is still 40% lower than it was last February. This means that blur users seem mostly to be existing users of ethereum, rather than any new participants in the network.
Looking to Bitcoin, however, the discovery of NFTs in December has triggered a wave of adoption for its 2021 Taproot upgrade. Stacks, a related protocol that also enables NFTs, has climbed 50% over the past week.
