Blur’s NFT Market Domination

Blur.io has taken the NFT marketplace by storm since its launch in October 2022. The platform has quickly become the largest trading platform for NFTs by volume, with a user-friendly interface that caters more to professional NFT traders than retail users.

Unlike other marketplaces, Blur offers batch shelf and floor-sweeping transactions in addition to order book NFT transactions, allowing traders to make batch operations more conveniently (buying NFTs with the lowest price at once). Buyers can not only browse NFTs on Blur but also on other NFT marketplaces and place orders directly through Blur with instant liquidity.

In terms of fees, Blur has a very trader-friendly fee structure and does not charge any transaction fees for users on the platform. In terms of royalties, which are mandatory for a certain percentage of secondary transactions on other marketplaces, Blur recommends a default royalty rate of 0.5% for buyers. However, this can be customized and even set to 0 if the user wishes. Overall, Blur.io offers a more convenient and cost-effective platform for professional NFT traders.

Blur was founded by PacmanBlur, an MIT-graduate and member of the Peter Thiel Fellowship. The product was built in conjunction with support from leading venture capitalists, such as Paradigm. The platform recently completed its $BLUR token airdrop after Season 1 of the incentivization program finished. Users were rewarded ‘Care Packages’ for providing liquidity and trading on the platform, which were available to be opened on the 14th of February. Some traders earned up to $3 million in $BLUR tokens and the project launched at an eye-watering $400 million valuation.

Blur has minted 3 billion BLUR tokens, which will be made accessible over 4 to 5 years. The token allocation is divided into 51% for the community, 29% for past and future core contributors, 19% for investors, and 1% for advisors. A community treasury of 360m BLUR tokens, equivalent to 12% of the total token supply, can be claimed by NFT traders, historical users of Blur, and creators.

The community treasury will distribute 39% of the BLUR supply through contributor grants, community initiatives, and incentive programs, with 10% allocated to the next incentive release. The vesting of BLUR tokens will occur continuously according to a set schedule for each group of token recipients.

Blur has grown to become the largest NFT Marketplace in the world with the help of their incentives program. It has successfully flipped OpenSea within 6 months of release due to its user-friendly UI, low fees, and deeper liquidity for NFTs. The platform boasts impressive stats with over 400,000 active users and $1.4 billion in traded volume according to Dune Analytics.

The Blur platform runs ten times faster than other NFT aggregators, displays the pending transactions on the NFT in less than one second, and updates the list every four seconds. The fast display of pending transactions, together with the nearly real-time metadata update on the collection art display, constitutes a huge advantage for users who want to quickly come in and out. In addition, Blur’s gas priority preset can help traders to outperform the competitors who purchase NFT through other exchanges or aggregators. Most importantly, the contract in Blur is more optimized than that in other markets, saving up to 17% on gas fees.

Another popular feature of Blur is that it can clearly show the rarity of different NFTs and the floor price under specific attributes. Rather than using sales history or a series list to evaluate NFTs that are priced higher than the floor price, Blur’s platform instead searches for the lowest priced NFTs based on their individual characteristics. This function can greatly simplify the process of finding undervalued NFTs, and thus it has become one of the main reasons why collectors and investors are drawn to Blur.

Additionally, the Blur team has also put a lot of effort into improving the user experience of their platform. The website is user-friendly, visually appealing, and easy to navigate, which makes it accessible to even those who are new to the world of NFTs. The team has also made sure that the platform is secure, reliable, and can handle a high volume of transactions without any technical glitches or issues. This has resulted in a seamless experience for users, which has contributed to the platform’s success.

Comparison to other platforms

Blur has emerged as a dominant player in the NFT marketplace due to its unique features, user-friendly interface, and emphasis on security and reliability. With the growing popularity of NFTs, it will be interesting to see how Blur continues to innovate and stay ahead of the competition in the coming years.

The launch of Blur has immediately pushed OpenSea to launch OpenSea Pro, their version of an aggregator. OpenSea Pro aims to compete with this by offering a similar experience, but with added benefits.

One of the key features of OpenSea Pro is its advanced search capabilities. Users can filter and sort through millions of NFTs with ease, making it easier to find exactly what they’re looking for. It also offers better curation tools, enabling collectors to create and manage collections of their favorite NFTs.

OpenSea Pro also boasts faster transaction times and lower gas fees than the regular OpenSea platform. This is due to its integration with a Layer 2 solution called Polygon. Transactions on Polygon are faster and cheaper than on the Ethereum network, which is the main blockchain used by OpenSea.

Another advantage of OpenSea Pro is its dedicated customer support team. OpenSea has received criticism in the past for its lack of customer support, and OpenSea Pro aims to address this by offering a dedicated team that is available to answer questions and resolve issues.

OpenSea Pro is currently in beta, but it’s already making waves in the NFT community. Its advanced features and improved user experience make it a strong competitor to other platforms, including Blur. If you’re an NFT collector or seller, it’s definitely worth checking out.

Pastel Network Partners with TomoChain to Integrate Pastel’s Sense and Cascade Protocols

Pastel is excited to announce its partnership with TomoChain — a layer 1 blockchain. TomoChain will be integrating Pastel’s Sense and Cascade protocol across its native NFT standard. This partnership signifies a massive step forward for the NFT ecosystem.

TomoChain has developed an NFT token standard — TRC721 — on the TomoChain network, expanding the possibilities for NFT platforms. One of these platforms built on the TomoChain blockchain is Pantograph, which allows users to digitize audio, video, and still images into NFTs, create NFTs without coding, buy, sell and auction NFTs, create communities on the platform, trade NFTs, and manage NFT assets. Through TomoChain’s integration with Pastel, NFT platforms built on the former will be able to leverage Pastel’s Sense and Cascade protocols to provide native storage and the duplicate-detection verification system to their users.

“The partnership with Pastel Network is a welcoming one, as it aligns greatly with our development value at TomoChain. Not only that, this integration with Pastel Network will also provide a rich layer for users to have a deeper understanding of ownership, value, and scarcity, especially within the NFT Space,” said Long Vuong, Founder and CEO of TomoChain. “We are excited to see this collaborative effort take off in the near future.”

Across the industry, digital asset security and reliability have become the primary issues plaguing organizations. Scams and frauds are rampant while centralized storage is showing their weaknesses and vulnerabilities. All layer 1 Blockchains and layer 2 Dapps are experiencing these road blocks and are on the search for solutions. Pastel provides them.

With Pastel’s Sense and Cascade protocols, organizations have the ability to prove authentication and certify the rareness of NFTs while having access to permanent and reliable storage.

“TomoChain provides robust NFT infrastructure, encouraging developers to take advantage of their versatility and adaptability” said Anthony Georgiades, Co-Founder of Pastel. “Pastel is eager to collaborate with TomoChain to provide all NFT projects housed in the ecosystem to take advantage of our unique protocols, crucial to the long term sustainability and success of the NFT space.”

Sense is a lightweight protocol on the Pastel Network, built to assess the relative rareness of a given NFT against near-duplicate data. Sense can recognize even the most subtle similarities between two digital collectibles, even if one has been transformed. The protocol goes beyond the standard “digital fingerprint” approach to establishing the rareness of an NFT, and actually looks at the rareness of the pixel patterns in data. While digital fingerprints do allow users to verify that an NFT was created by a particular creator, this is a fairly weak form of rareness. Sense solves this problem by assigning a ‘Relative Rareness Score’ to quantify how rare an NFT is relative to all NFTs in the underlying dataset.

Sense leverages a number of deep learning models using Tensorflow with Keras Applications to transform each NFT into a fixed list of over 10,000 numbers (the ‘NFT fingerprint vector’). It then assesses the correlation between a given fingerprint and the database of all existing fingerprints on Pastel and TomoChain’s platform, other NFT marketplaces (e.g., Rarible, OpenSea), and open databases on the entire internet (e.g., Google) and outputs a relative rareness score — a number between 0% (i.e., the NFT is identical to a previously registered NFT) to 100% (i.e., the NFT is completely unique). Sense “sees through” superficial changes in the same way as a human eye, and, like a human, can recognize even the most subtle change in an NFT.

Cascade, on the other hand, is a distributed storage protocol purpose-built for NFT metadata in a fully redundant, decentralized, and permanent manner. Pastel is the first NFT platform to have its own completely integrated, decentralized storage layer based on the advanced technologies of RaptorQ and Kademlia.

By leveraging the RaptorQ fountain code algorithm, Cascade begins by breaking each asset into a series of redundant chunks. Every chunk contains certain random fragments of the combined file which is distributed redundantly across participating SuperNodes running on the network. Two parameters control how the data is encoded into chunks: 1) size of each chunk and 2) desired redundancy factor. The sets of chunks are then randomly distributed across network nodes using Kademlia. No complex or centralized system for deciding which node is responsible for which chunk, no iteration through SuperNodes to find one with the relevant chunk, and no complicated logic for handling chunk re-allocation when SuperNodes enter and leave the network.

These first-of-their-kind protocols combat the most challenging of issues that every organization and individual is experiencing across the NFT ecosystem. TomoChain clearly saw the need for next-generation solutions to help support its network and platforms. This partnership with TomoChain is a prime showcase for what Pastel can offer to the entire space.

About TomoChain

TomoChain is a scalable blockchain-powered via Proof-of-Stake voting consensus and used commercially by companies globally.
TomoChain’s mission is to accelerate the onboarding of millions of users by empowering today’s applications with technology that masks the friction of Blockchain, all while retaining its underlying benefits.

About Pastel Network

Pastel is the world’s preeminent protocol standard for NFT technology. Pastel also allows for the development of third-party applications to sit on top of its Network, enabling developers to enjoy the scalable registration features, storage processes, and security of the broader ecosystem. Lightweight protocols such as Sense — which was built to assess the relative rareness of a given NFT against near-duplicate metadata — and Cascade — which conducts permanent, distributed storage of underlying NFT data — can be integrated across any native L1 blockchains or L2 marketplaces.
Pastel is an entirely native blockchain supported by SuperNodes, which provides computational resources to the network to support asset registration, distribution, and permanent storage. Pastel is managed by world-class developers, cryptographers, and technologists, supported alongside an experienced and extensive network of marketers, influencers, and third-party agencies. Pastel is backed by key stakeholders including Innovating Capital, a prominent venture fund.

Originally Published on Pastel Network’s Medium.