Following two straight months of sales growth, NFT trading rapidly accelerated over the past week as Ethereum NFT volume more than doubled during that span. It’s due to an evolving market in which upstart marketplace Blur has overtaken leader OpenSea, with traders rapidly flipping valuable NFTs like they’re DeFi tokens.
According to data from DappRadar, Blur has generated $460 million worth of Ethereum NFT trades over the past seven days—a 361% increase over the previous span. OpenSea, meanwhile, saw a 12% increase in trading volume to $107 million during that period. The third-place marketplace, X2Y2, tallied barely $11 million in trades in that time.
Overall, CryptoSlam points to a 155% week-over-week increase in Ethereum NFT trading volume. The surge in volume comes during a week in which Blur airdropped its BLUR governance token to NFT traders who earned rewards through the marketplace, and also by trading elsewhere ahead of Blur’s own launch last fall.
The BLUR token has a market cap of $466 million, at its current price of $1.20 per token, and it appears that at least some NFT collectors poured their airdropped funds back into buying NFTs. And they’re primarily using Blur to buy and sell NFTs, as the market data shows.
However, the surge in trading volume at Blur doesn’t appear to be primarily driven by traders simply selling off their BLUR tokens and buying and holding high-value NFTs. Instead, whale traders with significant NFT holdings appear to be flipping NFTs with even greater frequency than before, in an effort to boost potential future token reward allocations.
For example, the largest NFT project (market-wide) over the past week in terms of trading volume is Otherside, Yuga Labs’ upcoming metaverse game. The NFT
