Yesterday, Blur, the NFT marketplace, finally allowed its users to redeem care packages in exchange for $BLUR, the platform’s native token. The event was highly anticipated and resulted in a significant market surge over the last month, with the royalties-optional marketplace securing over $430 million in trading volume in the last 30 days. Several top traders raked in more than $1 million worth of tokens. According to DappRadar’s data, Blur’s 24-hour trading volume was approximately $9.5 million, putting it second only to OpenSea, whose trading volume was approximately $12 million.

Now, it appears that Blur is engaging in a new chapter of the Web3 royalty wars with OpenSea. In a blog post published on February 15th, the Blur team advised its users to block OpenSea’s NFT marketplace because creators currently cannot earn full royalties on both Blur and OpenSea. Instead, they have to select one platform to receive full royalties from. OpenSea automatically sets royalties to optional when they detect trading on Blur, which they say is a policy to protect creators and their own bottom line.

Blur vs. Opensea explained
OpenSea shared their reasoning for prohibiting royalty-optional marketplaces like Blur in a series of tweets that were posted in November 2022
“In the economic downturn, many of those looking to sell their NFTs are trying to sell them for as much as they can. Moving their listings to marketplaces that don’t enforce fees is one way to do this. For collectors, this means NFTs they really want are increasingly likely to be listed on marketplaces that don’t enforce creator fees. Even if these collectors say they want to pay creator fees, they’re becoming more and more prone to buying on those marketplaces…Unless something changes soon, this space is trending toward significantly fewer fees paid to creators.” — OpenSea
To address the issue of royalty fees, OpenSea is urging creators to take on-chain actions and prevent their NFTs from being sold on royalty-optional platforms. This is done through the use of on-chain tools that prevent the sale of NFTs on marketplaces that don’t enforce creator royalties. Blur is a royalty-optional platform, which means that its users must block their NFTs from being sold on it to earn full royalties on OpenSea. If they don’t, OpenSea automatically sets the royalties to “optional” for these collections. Blur argues that creators should have the final say on where and how their items are sold, and that they should be able to earn royalties on all marketplaces they whitelist. To support this, Blur enforces full royalties on collections that block trading on OpenSea.

According to their post, “OpenSea has mainly pointed to Blur’s policy on old collections that don’t have filters as the reason why new collections should still be filtered by Blur. However, their proposed solution has significant flaws… that’s why Blur has adopted a different approach that has a higher likelihood of resolving the issue permanently.”

The reaction to the post was quick, with numerous members of the Web3 community taking to Twitter and discussing a new chapter in the royalty wars. It’s yet to be determined who will emerge victorious in this battle. But one thing is certain at the moment — creators are stuck in the middle.