Dialogue with Blur Founder: Blur is about to launch its token, which NFTFi sectors are worth paying attention to?

Host: angelilu, Foresight News Researcher

Guests: Pacman, Founder of Blur; Joy Rich Community Red God; Vicky, VP of LD Capital

Roundtable Questions

1. Guest self-introduction + sharing experiences with Blur
2. The recent recovery of the NFT market, which types of projects will become the new generation of NFT blue chips?
3. With the rise of NFTs in the past two years and the increasingly robust ecosystem, will NFTFi become the main force in the next bull market? What sectors are currently available?
4. Compared to the leading NFT trading platform Opensea, what advantages does Blur have?
5. With the recovery of the market, the NFT market is also showing signs of warming up. Finally, could each guest share an NFT project they are currently paying attention to?

angelilu: Hello everyone, welcome to the Twitter Space hosted by OKX in collaboration with Foresight News. I am today's host, a researcher from Foresight News. The theme of today's event is "Blur is about to launch its token, which sectors of NFTFi are worth paying attention to?" Let's invite the three guests to introduce themselves and briefly share their experiences using Blur.

Pacman (translated by Skyler): Pacman is the Founder of Blur. Eight years ago, I was a software engineer in Silicon Valley, and then in 2016, I started my first venture and participated in a project incubated by Y Combinator. After that, I applied to MIT and met my partner. We shared similar entrepreneurial ideas and started many projects together. In 2018, we founded our first collaborative startup, which was successfully acquired at the end of 2021, and then I began my entrepreneurial journey with Blur.

Red God: Hello everyone, I am the community leader of Joy Rich. I will share my personal experience with NFTs. I got involved last year, mainly focusing on the secondary market. I really like NFTs. Last year, Blur had a blind box launch that attracted many people, and I started using Blur from that point.

Vicky: I am Vicky, currently at LD Capital. I started using Blur to list the Ape that is my current avatar at the end of December 2022, recommended by a friend. My experience, along with that of all the NFT veterans around me, is that Blur has some very new features, including gas fees, product smoothness, real-time transaction speed, and aggregated liquidity.

angelilu: Recently, the NFT market has warmed up. Which types of projects will become the new generation of NFT blue chips?

Pacman (translated by Skyler): First, let's talk about categories. Theoretically, we are still in a bear market, so new NFT projects may carry significant risks. I tend to focus more on the NFT blue chip sector, which I will pay more attention to.

Red God: I mainly engage in secondary market trading. I buy NFTs first because I like their art style, and secondly, mainly because of their community and culture, such as some current blue chip NFTs. I believe that if the narrative in the gaming sector is long enough, the development of NFTs will continue to improve.

angelilu: In the past two years, NFTs have risen, and the ecosystem has become increasingly robust. Will NFTFi become the main force in the next bull market? What sectors are currently available?

Vicky: Regarding whether NFTFi can become the main force in the next bull market, I believe it can, but it will take time. The earliest NFTFi users and DeFi users are actually from two different circles. In NFTFi groups, you can see many new faces, while in DeFi groups, you see many familiar faces. It will take time for DeFi users to transition to NFTFi. Additionally, the early IP players didn't initially understand what NFTFi was or why it was necessary, so for NFTFi to become the main force in the next bull market, it is essential to cultivate users, allowing early NFT users to experience the magic of "Fi" and attract DeFi users into NFTFi.

Red God: I am personally very optimistic about the development of NFTFi because it is particularly easy to break into new circles and presents many opportunities. The biggest drawback of NFTs is that the entry barrier for retail investors to good liquidity blue chip NFTs is too high. NFTFi may solve this problem. Currently, NFTFi is in its early development stage, and I believe that in the near future, with the prosperity of the NFT market, NFTFi will definitely become a particularly important sector, including in the next bull market. Important sectors of NFTFi include NFT collateral lending, NFT leasing, and NFT fragmentation.

Pacman (translated by Skyler): The growth of NFTs is actually similar to the growth of the token market, but it came a few years later. The emergence of DeFi was due to the increase in token trading volume and financialization, and NFTs follow the same trend. Therefore, at this stage, we are mainly focused on continuously enhancing the professionalism of NFT trading. When NFT trading becomes more professional and the volume increases, NFTFi will develop into an important sector. Currently, NFTFi has a market, but we may not have seen some very exciting projects emerge yet, so we are taking a wait-and-see approach. As a platform providing NFT trading for professional traders, Blur will continue to optimize and improve trading in the future.

angelilu: Compared to the leading NFT trading platform Opensea, what advantages does Blur have?

Pacman (translated by Skyler): The reason we started Blur is that in 2021, I personally got involved in the NFT trading field, but I was very frustrated with the existing infrastructure because OpenSea and all other NFT markets focused heavily on retail users. They are very similar to Coinbase, optimized for new users. However, I wanted a more professional NFT trading platform, a truly real-time trading and fast, efficient NFT market. Our target users are professional traders. Just like in token trading, Coinbase has a significant advantage in retail, but other exchanges like OKX can serve more professional trading users. Blur is a platform designed for professional NFT trading, with the advantage of providing services to professional NFT trading users.

Red God: Blur itself is an NFT trading aggregator. From a user's perspective, the biggest feeling it gives me is speed; it is easier to grab NFTs at floor prices. Additionally, the interface of Blur does not recommend aesthetically pleasing or new projects on the homepage like traditional OpenSea; it feels more like an exchange.

Vicky: First, from the perspective of retail investors, the cost of purchasing NFTs may include the price of the NFT itself, as well as miner gas fees, platform fees, and royalties. If you buy an NFT, it generally needs to increase by about 8-10% for you to break even. Blur fundamentally makes costs more controllable, which is more user-friendly. The second aspect is that because Blur's system has your Ethereum staked in advance, your money is already in that sector, so its purchasing speed may be superior to other platforms. The third aspect is in terms of products; so far, Blur uses the Seaport protocol to implement a dual system, effectively bypassing OpenSea's restrictions on mandatory royalties in the market. This means that both 0 royalty projects and mandatory royalty projects can be traded on Blur's platform, significantly consolidating the increase in Blur's trading volume data. In addition to speed and grabbing floor prices, its multi-platform aggregated liquidity and bulk order buying and selling features are more user-friendly for traders looking to professionally trade NFTs. I see that Blur's interface has details like prices, indices, and listings, which is very effective, allowing us not to check our wallets to see which NFTs we have and which are listed, and not to jump to other third-party markets to see what the floor prices of the NFTs I currently hold are. It effectively provides us with a function to manage our NFT portfolio.

angelilu: With the recovery of the market, the NFT market is also showing signs of warming up. Finally, could each guest share an NFT project they are currently paying attention to?

Red God: I will share the NFT project DigiDaigaku, which spent $6.5 million on advertising during the Super Bowl. I have been following this project since last year and have invested in it myself. This project is essentially a narrative for a large game, and the project team develops storylines by issuing character weapons in the game. I believe this project has a high potential to develop into a blue chip.

Pacman (translated by Skyler): This is a relatively sensitive question because it involves investment-related issues. I usually do not mention a specific NFT project, but I can talk about how to evaluate whether an NFT project is of high quality or has future potential. First, look at the project's team, specifically the founder, and whether they have invested 100% of their effort into the project to generate alpha. Currently, it is evident that the popularity of NFTs in the Western market is higher than in Asia, but the Asian market is also steadily rising, such as Azuki.

Audience Questions

ZW: The first question is about the product level. Compared to other aggregators, why can Blur achieve such fast refresh speeds? Is it due to optimizations at the contract level, or is it through frequent front-end and back-end interface calls and refreshes?

Pacman (translated by Skyler): The speed is achievable because Blur has a world-class development team. Out of a team of 10, 7 are software engineers, and these engineers come from other top global projects and MIT, providing excellent technical support.

ZW: The second question is about project revenue sources. Currently, not being profitable means there is no formal revenue source. Besides the upcoming token launch, are there other revenue models being considered?

Pacman (translated by Skyler): As an NFT trading platform, Blur's long-term revenue source will ultimately rely on transaction fees collected from user trades. The reason for not charging transaction fees in the early stages is that Blur is currently in a phase of promoting itself to professional NFT traders, needing some advantages to capture the market and let professional NFT traders know about the benefits of fast, real-time trading. This decision is made for the long-term positive development of Blur.

Fiona: How will Blur ensure that the trading volume remains as high as it is now after the airdrop incentives end?

Pacman (translated by Skyler): We have always maintained that if we use incentive mechanisms, we only incentivize liquidity, not trading volume. This is similar to the incentive model of Curve in DeFi. If we incentivize trading volume, it will only lead people to think it is wash trading, not real users. We are confident that we can maintain trading volume without rewards because we have already closed half of the rewards, yet trading volume continues to grow. About two months ago, on December 6, we stopped incentivizing NFT listings. Incentives may be very useful for networks built from scratch, but we believe that maintaining trading volume does not require incentives. Hildobby has done a lot of data analysis on Blur's trading volume on Dune and found that the vast majority is organic trading volume. Overall, airdrops are not the decisive or only indicator of Blur's trading volume.

story: Why haven't leading projects like ENS launched on Blur in the DID sector? What are the standards for launching NFT projects on Blur? Are there plans to launch projects like ENS in the future?

Pacman (translated by Skyler): The standard for projects launched on Blur is based on requests from the entire community. Projects that have not launched on Blur may not have a current demand from community members for it to be listed. However, if audience members want a specific project to be launched on Blur, they can propose it in Discord.

story: Blur currently only supports web usage. Are there plans to support mobile in the future?

Pacman (translated by Skyler): As this user mentioned, currently Blur only supports web usage and does not support mobile. However, based on trading data, Blur has already surpassed many NFT trading platforms. If we add mobile support, it will definitely have a positive impact on platform expansion and user growth. Therefore, there are plans to add a mobile app in the future, but there is no specific timeline yet. Everyone can stay tuned in the community.

bin: Does Blur have plans to open an Open API in the future? How can developers aggregate Blur and develop some derivative tools?

Pacman (translated by Skyler): We are developing an API and will release it later so that anyone can access it directly without needing to go through an application process or similar steps. Currently, the bottleneck is with the engineering team, as we are still in the project development stage. Therefore, the seven software engineers in the team are focused solely on the launch. Once the project matures, we will open the Open API in the future, allowing more developers to use it or build other tools and projects within the Blur ecosystem.