01/03/2023 Ethereum NFT marketplace passes $1B in volume for first time since May as the creator royalties war heats up

Glowing and shiny digital background with heap of stylized NFT tokens

Image Credits:whitehoune / Getty Imagesunder a RF license.

The NFT marketmay be finding its footing again as the market for non-fungible tokens on the Ethereum blockchain surpassed $1 billion for the first time since May 2022.

Amid the recent rebound, NFT marketplace Blur has also bested the once-largest NFT marketplace OpenSea in monthly volume for the third month in a row as the crypto market debates the issue of NFT creator royalties. Earlier this month, Blur also released its highly anticipated token airdrop, which disbursed about 360 million Blur tokens to users, or about 12% of the project’s total supply.

Many speculated that Blur activity would fall off after its airdrop lure concluded. Instead, trading volume on the marketplace continued to grow. The rise of Blur in the NFT market has helped reignite a debate concerning royalties. In previous quarters, OpenSea tried to balance creator royalties as it held the top position for NFT marketplaces, but Blur’s aggressive stance is causing OpenSea to change its tack.

Blur’s NFT marketplace has a 0.5% royalty fee, which many view as so nominal it’s basically nothing.

“I get the sense that Blur is not necessarily anti-royalties,”Yat Siu, chairman of Animoca Brands, said to TechCrunch. “But what Blur is doing, and other marketplaces are doing as well, is trying to capture market share.”

Arts

https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/28/ethereum-nft-marketplace-passes-1b-in-volume-for-first-time-since-may-as-the-creator-royalties-war-heats-up/?guccounter=1

Interesting NFTs
CryptoKitties
Good day! I'm Kitty #153350. I want to live in a world where people believe that one day cats will rule this planet. I like to listen to Gloria Estefan while grooming. Don't judge me. Purrhaps this is the beginning of a beautiful relationship.
The Switch
The Switch is a unique, “one of one” NFT that demonstrates the evolution of artwork in the digital realm. The Switch is developed to change form at a specific point of time in the future, known by Pak. The evolution is determined and rendered immutable by smart contracts, or self-executing code on the Ethereum blockchain.
The Scion
A young figure caught in a moment of distraction, aware only ephemerally of his unconscious being, as it engages in psychological and psychedelic layer spaces. His right arm casually cradles a moray eel; the figure is comfortable but not truly aware of the potentials for danger in such negligence. His shirt reads “Bello” in Pokemon style font, harkening back to a childhood straddling the millennial threshold. To his right side, out of the unconscious deep, shrouded alien heads propagate as a fractal totem, each new iteration a more sophisticated rendering of emotional masking over the cold mystery of the greys. As the scion of the Budgie-Sattva, the young man, in his distraction, is also simultaneously aware of higher levels of self discovery. To his left a psychological topology sets beneath the oracle side of an 8 ball ,hovering; its message a purest concept of acceptance. The “Scion” lettering is in 80’s HeMan style bold declaration. The lower right side of the painting is like a hybrid of melon, feathers, and seeds. The crystals in the background bring light; conducted, refracted, reflected, and dispersed, to balance the dark shadow of the figure’s physical body. The aura of the scion succeeds in layers to point, with a finger, and the crown chakra, toward a center of a mandala existing as nigh pure application of strokes, in essence painterly abstraction, but also revealing hints of the Aura of migraine, and the bi-hemispherical nature of the brain–noting concerns of the possibility of inherited mental disease. Yet the flourish of chakra as it sets against that center is robust, active, coherent, and reveling against all fear. Fundamentally, the piece speaks to the activation of one’s potential to begin to “Know Thyself”, and find greater awareness out of the enigmas of the mind–as an inculcated seed given to the rich soil of one’s own birthright.
Alex in Wonderland
A figure, Alex, stands mostly naked in the midst of a physical and psychological maelstrom. He is clad only in nostalgic 80’s era socks, on a tenuous island between active waters and a variety of shark denizens. Sharks on the right side of the image are all beached, including a shark with a quartz crystal snout, an orange shark wrapped in a life buoy, and a shark further in the distance wearing an 80’s style shirt with the number “88”. On the left side is the largest shark, wearing bright glossy red lipstick and brandishing prominent teeth with braces. She is cordoned off from the figure by a roped float divider, and within her thought bubble is a warning symbol. Behind the figure, hovering in the air, are Grey aliens emerging from the distance, out of a series of elliptical UFO shaped interdimensional membranes. The Greys take on the visual form of spermazoa ostensibly impregnating the interdimensional thresholds. As is typical, these Greys inhabit a zone just behind the unconscious topology of Alex’s dissociative mind. Though Alex’s bottom half is representative, his top half mutates into a psychological cornucopia. In a manner akin to “Auto-Erotic Sphinx”, a predecessor work, the figure has self suctioned—an act of sensual infatuation, enjoyment, and exploration. Upward exists the figure’s primary conscious eye, adorned with a revolutionary beret emblazoned with a Bitcoin badge. The figure’s summit features the nose of a fighter jet facing off against video game Bullet Bills, one of whom is marked by a communist North Korean star. A cropped section of a UFO observes the contest. Alex’s mind branches both left and right. To the left is more singular embodied consciousness, manifesting two eyes and a Ganesh trunk grasping crayons. The right branch dissociates upward diagonally, emerging into an array of eyes, faces, teeth, tail, a unicorn horn, and much more—all of which participate in expressing his unconscious being; a democracy of psychic factions representing thought impressions and associations. All illumination and darkness– fernal, infernal, high consciousness and corporeal underbelly–reside in this realm. In the distance are relatively languid, light clouds, and against the firmament hovers a colossal distant eye peering over the scene and far beyond. This painting possesses underlying genetic traits with previous works such as “Auto-Erotic Sphinx with Toys”, “Dionysus”, and “Fuku-Shiva”. The work serves also as a nod to an earlier period of art inspiration during late teens and early twenties— born out of the nakedness, vulnerability, curiosity, and wonder inherent to coming of age and all subsequent psychedelic revelation.
#54165
By OthersideDeployer