NFT trading fees spike as gas charges climb to $160
On Tuesday, NFT trades came at an excellent expense for NFT enthusiasts: each transaction cost $160 in gas charges. There were only 382 transactions in an hour, but the average cost of gas was nine times higher than the NFTs.
Blur launches airdrop on Valentine’s day, spiking gas fees
Blur released their eagerly anticipated token, giving fans what they’d been waiting for, while some people celebrated Valentine’s Day worldwide. Blur has grown in popularity since its debut in October of last year. It rivals OpenSea in terms of trading volume and has the second-highest number of daily active users. It is now the largest NFT marketplace.
On Tuesday, Ethereum NFT professional traders could finally collect their postponed airdrop of BLUR tokens at a hefty price.
Blur sent qualified individuals to the AirDrop landing page after the firm posted a notice about the rollout on social media. According to Blockworks Research, some traders spent up to $160 on gas fees for Tuesday’s eagerly anticipated BLUR airdrop.
According to Spencer Hughes, an analyst at Blockworks Research, the airdrop resulted in a theatrical day on Ethereum, with gas prices reaching around 1500 GWEI. According to Hughes, traders could sell BLUR for $5 per token on Tuesday, a ten-fold premium over its $0.50 on-chain pricing.
According to the expert, numerous traders rushed to take advantage of BLUR pricing discrepancies on controlled exchanges. Blur is an aggregator of marketplaces that enables users to browse NFTs across many networks in addition to its primary NFT marketplace feature.
Blur’s native token launch marks the end of incentivized airdrops
The company has offered airdrops as incentives for users ever since it launched. The first airdrop it offered to bear market-active NFT traders awarded care packages that users could swap for BLUR. To receive rewards, traders had to list an NFT on the site. Blur used similar strategies in its second airdrop, which paid users for reporting NFT sales on Blur.
Blur’s final airdrop and the debut of its native BLUR coin took place on Tuesday, with one trader collecting nearly $2 million in tokens.
Whether the platform can maintain its high trade volumes will remain the critical question.
Hughes remarked that it would be fascinating to see how the holders decide to extend the utility of the token, whether through fee-sharing or premium services, once BLUR governance is online.
Will Blur be a LooksRare replica?
On many platforms, token incentives have been a significant motivator of trading activity; however, there are questions regarding how these bonuses are earned.
Wash trading, the practice of artificially increasing the price of NFTs to influence the rewards system, has been charged against several users. Early in 2022, this occurred on the LooksRare platform, raising concerns about similar behavior happening on other sites.
Blur has not produced any suspicious-looking trades, but despite having a higher overall trading volume than OpenSea, it has significantly fewer active users and transactions. This raises concerns about the reliability of trading activity on the platform and whether token incentives generate genuine interest in NFTs or encourage users to game the system.
