invezz.com
The future of the BLUR token seems to be turning uncertain after a splendid performance after concerns about rising wash trading on the Blur NFT marketplace. At press time, BLUR/USD was trading at $0.5574 after a 1.34% drop in the past 24 hours.
Blur’s NFT marketplace trading activity has increased considerably over the past four months making Blur topple the OpenSea NFT marketplace which was at the top for quite a long while.
Wash trading on Blur NFT marketplace tripled
Wash trading manipulates the market and inflates the trade volume and value of assets when investors, individuals, and institutions buy and sell the same assets.
According to a report by Dune, wash trading on Blur has tripled over the past month and currently equates to 34% of the total trading volume on the NFT marketplace. Additionally, Coingecko also reported that wash trading volume jumped 124% to $580 million in February from January’s trading volume of $250 million.
It is possible that Blur users sold NFTs to themselves using multiple wallets after Blur’s loyalty program including Airdrops among other incentives trading activities. The users are most likely targeting points for Airdrops.
However, it is worth noting that even if the wash trading volume was adjusted, the Blur NFT marketplace would still remain at the top of the NFT market. When the wash trading volume is filtered, Blur’s share of the market dropped to 69% from 74% which is when the wash trading volume is included.
As of February 2023, the NFT wash trading accounted for 23.4% of the adjusted trading volume. However, although this is still a high figure, it is quite an improvement compared to January 2022 when wash trading was about 67%.