Blur Escalates Royalty Battle With OpenSea, Recommends Blocking Platform

The battle between zero-fee non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace Blur and leading competitor OpenSea has intensified as both platforms vie for market share among NFT creators.

On Wednesday, Blur published a blog post aimed at NFT creators that laid out the differences in royalty payment options between its platform and OpenSea. When Blur first launched in October, the platform followed a royalty-optional model popularized by competitors like X2Y2. In November, it expanded royalties to permission NFTs and a month later began enforcing a minimum royalty fee of 0.5%.

Now, Blur says that in order for creators to collect full royalties on its platform, collections will need to blocklist OpenSea, which enforces full royalties for new projects that launch on its platform. It does so by allowing creators to add a code snippet to their NFT contracts that restricts sales of their project on secondary NFT marketplaces that don't honor royalties.

“Our preference is that creators should be able to earn royalties on all marketplaces that they whitelist, rather than being forced to choose,” Blur said in its post.

The blog post outlined the various approaches that creators can take to ensure they earn royalties when their projects are listed for resale on Blur. The platform said that because of conflicting rules, artists can’t earn royalties on both OpenSea and Blur simultaneously and that it recommends that creators block their tokens from being listed on OpenSea.

“Today, OpenSea automatically sets royalties to optional when they detect trading on Blur. We would like to welcome OpenSea to stop this policy so that new collections can earn royalties everywhere,” Blur said.

In January, traders discovered an apparent loophole that allowed Blur to skirt past OpenSea’s policy of blocking trading on secondary marketplaces that don't honor creator royalties. This has since intensified competition between OpenSea and Blur, which has seen rapid growth in trading volumes in recent months, according to blockchain data analytics platform Nansen.

On Tuesday, Blur released its anticipated native token, BLUR, which reached $500 million in trading volume hours after its airdrop. According to data from Dune Analytics, Blur has surpassed OpenSea’s trading volume for the past week by over $13 million.