Weekly NFT sales surge amid marketplace Blur’s new round of token airdrop

Global non-fungible token (NFT) sales surged by 159% over the seven days from Feb. 17 to Feb. 23, with rising NFT marketplace Blur’s rewards appearing to continue driving most of the action across the sector.

Total weekly NFT sales increased to US$772 million in the seven days from US$299 million in the previous week, according to data from NFT aggregation site CryptoSlam.

The average price of the assets sold on Tuesday increased to US$566.43, more than three times higher than US$175.57 on Feb. 14.

“Blur rewards are still driving most of the action across the NFT space as Season 2 of Blur farming has now opened up,” said Yehudah Petscher, NFT relations strategist of Cryptoslam.

On Feb. 14, Blur released and airdropped its Blur tokens. On Wednesday, it that it will distribute another 300 million Blur tokens. The cryptocurrency was trading at US$0.94 at 3 p.m. in Hong Kong on Friday, according to CoinMarketCap data.

Over the past seven days, the Blur NFT marketplace recorded US$652.28 million in trading volume, more than four times higher than market leader OpenSea’s US$150.66 million, DappRadar data showed.

Petscher said that Blur’s reward system has been the talk of the town, but “it’s really the mechanics of the site that are noteworthy.”

“The offer and bid system allows for a gamified tug of war that, combined with high trading volume, can lead to price stability,” Petscher said. “Two days ago, we saw a sale of 71 Bored Apes for over 5,500 ETH (US$9 million), and witnessed the floor price of the collection remain stable.”

Petscher add that this all hinges on traders remaining active with bids and offers, but “if the combination of Blur rewards with low or no fees remains, this has the potential to change how traders play NFTs.”

Also this week, Petscher said that the spikes in Ethereum transactions were also worth noting. “More significant than average sales though is the number of transactions we’re seeing on Ethereum both last month and now this February.”

Between Feb. 1 and Feb. 23, the NFT sales volume on Ethereum exceeded US$1.15 billion, surpassing the total sales volume of US$780 million for the entire month of January, CryptoSlam data showed.

On Wednesday, the single-day sum of NFT sales on Ethereum amounted to nearly US$122.4 million, logging a new high since May 2022.

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