Blur Tells Users to Ban OpenSea

Yesterday, NFT marketplace Blur finally allowed users to redeem care packages for $BLUR, the platform’s native token. The event was highly anticipated and resulted in a significant market surge over the last month. Ultimately, the royalties-optional marketplace secured over $430 million in trading volume in the last 30 days.

And yesterday, the money continued to flow. The event saw several top traders rake in more than $1 million worth of tokens.

Now, it seems that Blur is opening a new chapter in its books by taking on one of the titans of Web3 — OpenSea. In a blog post published this afternoon (Feb. 15), the Blur team told users that they should block OpenSea’s NFT marketplace.

To understand this issue, you need to know that creators currently can’t earn full royalties on both Blur and OpenSea. Instead, they need to choose one to earn full royalties on — OpenSea or Blur, but not both. This happens because OpenSea automatically sets royalties to optional when they detect trading on Blur.

Why? According to OpenSea, it protects both creators and their own bottom line.

In order for full creator fees to be enforced on OpenSea, the company requires individuals who created smart contracts after January 2, 2023, to take on-chain action to make royalties enforceable. In simpler terms, OpenSea requires creators to use on-chain tools that prevent the sale of NFTs on marketplaces that don’t enforce creator royalties. Notably, Blur is included in this category. As a result, users must block their NFTs from being sold on Blur in order to earn full royalties on OpenSea.

If an individual opts not to do this, OpenSea automatically sets royalties to “optional” on these collections.

Blur takes issue with this stance, claiming that creators should be the ones to decide where and how their items are sold and not companies. “Our preference is that creators should be able to earn royalties on all marketplaces that they whitelist, rather than being forced to choose. To encourage this, Blur enforces full royalties on collections that block trading on OpenSea,” the wrote in the blog post.

The response to the post was swift. Many members of the Web3 community took to Twitter and began posting about a new era in the royalty wars.