🦧 Marketplace Bidding Wars

Talking points

🤯 Blur starting NFT marketplace war

By now you have probably seen or heard about $BLUR and if you haven’t, buckle up and enjoy the ride! 

Blur is an NFT marketplace looking to compete with other NFT marketplaces for user dominance, and market share. However, looking to compete may be an underestimate, especially with them releasing their token airdrop $BLUR.

TLDR → Blur has significantly grown recently and taken market dominance from other NFT marketplaces including Opensea. This airdrop has seen a significant increase in users moving over to the Blur platform, but surprisingly not just because of the airdrop, but the preferred platform mechanics ⛓

Now, compared to Opensea, who quite frankly seem panicked by this move from Blur, are now having to try and repair the situation and act in response to claw back some precious users.

Here is Opensea's response to try and give users incentives to continue using their platform:

Is it all positive news?

Although this may seem like these are only positives for the NFT world, it may not completely appear as it seems, there could be some negatives too 👇

The question is, will there be another opportunity related to $BLUR?

The short answer is yes. This is because a season 2 airdrop is already planned for $BLUR and if you want to find out more, this thread may provide some insight:

🧩 Coinbase solution for Ethereum

Could the Ethereum scaling problem finally be solved? And when will the riddle of another scaling solution ever end? 

A big announcement came this week with Coinbase, the crypto exchange giant that are expanding its offerings with a L2 Ethereum network called ‘BASE’.

What does this mean and how does this impact users? BASE will provide a better solution for new and existing users to integrate within the ecosystem.

The crypto world is a sometimes difficult place to navigate, with too many complications and safety concerns. Onboarding made easier is a big incentive to increase adoption.

However, it is important to note that Coinbase is NOT planning on releasing a native token to go with this.

But that doesn’t mean they will not in the future, so a possible airdrop could be in the works, but I wouldn’t get your hopes up just yet. 

The positives to this are the use of Optimisms OP stack, which will help with scaling issues on the Ethereum blockchain. So, overall this is definitely a positive move from Coinbase to "help onboard the next 1B+ users" as they worded it themselves. 

Here is a nice thread to better inform you about Base and the usage of Optimisms OP stack 👇

📊 China bullish or bearish for crypto?

There have been a lot of China related narratives recently, not just crypto related, but finance and economics in general. Let's unpack the impact this having on crypto. 

Firstly, China has recently injected huge amounts of money back into markets, rumoured to be around $ 92B which is an incredible amount in a short space of time. However, does this replicate through other markets in China or is it a hidden divergence for crypto?

Crypto hub wen?

With Hong Kong potentially embracing the crypto narrative and adoption in China, with an ambition to make it a crypto hub for the world, does this have diminishing impacts on other regions around the world, more specifically U.S.?

What's next? 

Although a big sum of money has entered the market this is not necessarily a good thing for crypto as odd as that may sound. The main reason would be that the investments are coming from institutions due to retail investors being out of the picture.

Could this spark a longer-term bullish case from China instead, or cause more harm for the market?