Blur Will Reward NFT Artists That Block OpenSea

On Feb 19, 2023

In what is shaping up to be a battle of the NFT marketplace titans, Blur is promising to enforce full creator royalties for any creator that blocks their collection from trading on OpenSea. This announcement comes days after Blur successfully launched its token through an airdrop in which participants gained millions of BLUR tokens.

Blur’s offensive move against OpenSea comes as retaliation for what the management of the protocol dubs “non-competitive practices” from the leading NFT marketplace. The bone of contention is creator royalty fees.

Yesterday we made an update to our royalty policy. Here’s the blog post accompanying that – it was meant to go out yesterday but due to the launch mayhem we weren’t able to publish until now. https://t.co/jeRcQYkvAr
— Blur (@blur_io) February 15, 2023

Blur is one of the many marketplaces that made creator royalty fees optional at the height of the bear market to encourage trading on their platforms. OpenSea followed suit but reversed the decision after a strong backlash from creators. They then proceeded to introduce a tool that allowed creators to block their collections from trading on marketplaces that didn’t fully honor creator royalties. A move that hurt Blur’s value proposition to NFT artists.

Blur Wants OpenSea To Address Its Unfair Policy

In a blog statement, Blur notes that “creators that whitelist both OpenSea and Blur should be able to earn royalties on both platforms.” Before adding “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.”

As things stand, Blur doesn’t fully honor creator royalties. It only enforces 0.5% as the minimum, but traders have the option to pay more if they want to. This is in stark contrast to OpenSea, which enforces 5% to 10% creator royalty fees on every secondary sale of their works. For prominent collections, this fee can earn creators millions of dollars in revenue.

According to Blur, their new policy change is a survival tactic meant to address the injustice OpenSea has caused the platform. Some traders have welcomed the move, describing it as the unavoidable outcome of OpenSea’s underhanded tactics.