Looking back on the ongoing NFT marketplace battle, it is clear to see that Blur has done serious and likely irreparable damage to OpenSea. They’ve eviscerated their dominance over the ETH market, forced their hand in the royalties battle, and ultimately showcased how slow to iterate and innovate their team has been. OpenSea still does maintain a lead in terms of daily active wallets, indicating that they still retain the majority of NFT market participants day-to-day, but volume and high-performance trading has clearly shown preference to Blur.

     They say that the market tends towards “max pain.” In the world of NFT companies, max pain is bearish market conditions existing just long enough that company funds (which are often stored as volatile assets like ETH or SOL) dwindle to near zero just before the return of a bull cycle. This is crushing. Companies that went lean to survive in the bear market have either still failed outright, or failed to prepare significant enough deliverables to capitalize on the return of the bull. Often, this leads to a final conclusion for many teams: Sell or dissolve the company.