February was the greatest month for the NFT market since May of last year.
Blur’s trading volume increased by more than $1.13 billion in February.
According to DappRadar’s analysis of market activity, the number of NFT sales surged in February to levels not seen since the beginning of crypto winter in the spring of 2022. This is a huge increase from January when trading was $941 million when it jumped to almost $2.04 billion.
Based on these metrics, February was the greatest month for the NFT market since May of last year, when Terra’s collapse shattered the crypto economy and froze the once-scorching NFT market.
Controversy Around Blur
Yet, the rise seems to have been mostly inspired by one firm, the recently launched Blur NFT marketplace. The new NFT market recently overtook OpenSea in trading volume, and its meteoric ascent has been supported by incentives that financially reward committed users for not trading on any other platform and, critically, for trading as many high-value NFTs as possible.
Incredibly, Blur’s trading volume increased by more than $1.13 billion in February compared to the previous month, which is virtually the entire month-over-month increase in the NFT market. A few of the “whales” were responsible for the vast bulk of that volume by trading NFTs back and forth in order to amass BLUR tokens as part of the company’s incentive program.
The NFT ecosystem is now being dominated by the topic of whether or not such trading should be considered real volume. The biggest NFT monitoring site, Cryptoslam, said this week that it will be removing $577 million in Blur transactions from its records owing to “market manipulation.” One more major NFT and DeFi tracker, DappRadar, has opted to include Blur’s trading volume in its official tally.