The exponential growth of the NFT track is one of the brightest existences in the encryption field in the past few years. Some people value its cultural attributes, some people believe that its essence is more financial products, and some people believe that its emergence and prosperity mean that it is finally possible for us to map real-world assets to the blockchain in some way.
This article will go deep into the most certain and largest opportunity in the NFT track – NFT trading platform, starting from its current competitive landscape and moat, and analyze the most topical emerging platform in the past year – the development of Blur and its airdrop The achievements and worries behind the strategy.
The Competitive Landscape of NFT Trading Platforms
There are many NFT trading platforms because the supply side pursues transaction volume and the migration cost is extremely low. They can be simply divided into two categories – comprehensive trading platforms and vertical trading platforms. Comprehensive platforms cover a wide range of NFT categories; vertical platforms focus on specific categories or industries, such as games or curated NFT collections.
The most popular comprehensive NFT trading platform is OpenSea, and Rarible, Mintable, Coinbase, etc. are all challengers of OpenSea. The differences between different comprehensive NFT trading platforms are mainly reflected in:
1) The convenience of discovering new projects is different: Currently, Twitter and Discord are the mainstream platforms for discovering new NFT projects. By improving the display interface and search function, the trading platform is expected to promote the discoverability of new (high-quality) items, thereby increasing the user’s dwell time.
2) The completeness of integrated SaaS tools and functions is different: At present, OpenSea and its competitors are more like front-end products with relatively friendly interfaces that are not yet fully mature. If additional features are added, such as NFT portfolio management tools, easier minting tools for creators, and richer social features, exchanges will further lock-in users and increase their migration costs.
3) Reputation and popularity are different: In the field of encryption, “trustworthy” platforms are very scarce. At present, OpenSea’s most important advantage over other competitors comes from this. Therefore, the project party will regularly put its OpenSea link on the Discord channel and Twitter personal homepage, which undoubtedly creates a “reputation” moat for OpenSea.
Vertical trading platforms are represented by Foundation, SuperRare, Immutable, etc. They all focus on a specific vertical, such as Immutable focusing on GameFi, and SuperRare focusing on works of famous artists.
