$BLUR AIRDROP with Blur's Founder, Pacman

Bankless Nation, welcome to this very special edition of Bankless. We gotta talk about the airdrop that just happened because it has burned an all-time high 24 hour of ETH burn inside of 24 hours, which always gets me excited. But of course, we're talking about the Blur NFT trading platform, which just released this token into the wild and has gained a ton of excitement. Just some quick stats to throw at you all. $1 billion in volumes traded through Blur, over 1 billion trades, almost 100,000 active users so far. And ever since uh the late stages of 2022 has been gaining in market share over OpenSea. Uh and so we're bringing on the Blur founder Pac-Man. Uh I don't know if he calls himself a founder. I'll ask him that when we get on to the show, uh, to talk about the ethos of Blur. Where does how does Blur uh position itself in the world of NFTs? Who is Blur optimizing for? Is it optimizing for traders? Is it optimizing for collectors? Uh, how is Blur going to develop and how did this massive airdrop that just came into the world today? How is it organized? Uh, what does the token do? Uh, and all of the other royalty wars that are also part of the conversation going around in the NFT world. So, all of these conversations and more. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible.

Bankless Nation, I am here with Pac-Man. And as you can see, if you are watching the YouTube, this is a visual representation of what Pac-Man may or may not look like. Pac-Man, welcome to the show.

GMGM, thanks so much for having me.

Uh so Pac Man, we're gonna talk all of course about Blur, the NFT trading marketplace, the the airdrop and also the royalties wars. But uh as bankless listeners will probably know, I don't pay attention to the NFT world nearly as much as I do the DeFi or the Protocol or Layer Two spaces. So I kinda wanna start this conversation at the very beginnings. Uh who are you and how did you come to work uh and found Blur and where did that idea come come from in the first place?

Yeah, totally. Would it be helpful to just give kind of some background on myself?

Sure.

Just to start off.

Yeah.

Yeah, so

for me, I got my start in engineering uh around eight years ago in Silicon Valley.

Uh so I started off as an engineer and then quickly moved on to starting my first business back in 2016.

Uh went through Y Combinator, which

for those of you in the web two world will know, maybe in Web3 you're less familiar, but you know, YC.

They are a big accelerator. They funded

Dropbox Stripe Airbnb Reddit.

I went through their program.

Afterwards, really wanted to go to school. Ended up going to MIT, studied math there with computer science, and met Galaga, my co founder.

And we basically just hit it off and started working together ever since.

Initially started working on side projects. We eventually left MIT to start our first business together back in 2018.

We ran that business for three years and we sold it at the end of 2021.

And we started working on Blur immediately afterwards. And the reason why is because in 2021, I personally gotten really into NFTs. I meant to BloodMap as my first NFT, held it to its eighth, sold it, and then I was just completely hooked. I really fell in love with the trading side of NFTs,

but I was just very frustrated with the infrastructure.

All the existing marketplaces were very retail oriented and rather slow and clunky.

I wanted something that was more of a professional trading platform for NFTs. So that's exactly what we set out to build at Blur.

And so you identified as an NFT trader very early on. It's like that's kind of the thing that really gravitated you gravitated towards. But then out of your frustration of the lack of infrastructure for NFT traders, that was the main inspiration for creating Blur.

Yep, exactly.

And what what would you say what was uh deficient in the world of NFT trading that frustrated you before Blur was created?

Yeah, you know, David, I think as someone who's maybe

more familiar with the token world, I think the right analogy is if you look at the progression of the token trading market,

right? We started with infrastructure like Mt. Gox or Coinbase.

These are very primitive, you know, retail friendly ways to, you know, at least Coinbase, retail friendly way to buy and sell crypto. And then over time, you saw as the needs of the space developed, the infrastructure.

Became increasingly advanced and financialized.

We went from

infrastructure like Coinbase, which is very optimized for retail, to more crypto native exchanges. You had Binance, OKX, Hobby, BitMEX, DareBit, more financialized exchanges, you know, FTX, of course, before they rugged everyone. So

that

development of infrastructure is the same progression that we're seeing in the NFT space today.

When you look at the NFT market, it's really only had its moment in the last two years. So the infrastructure really has not had too much time to develop, but the needs of the space have been growing. And so

that need for professionalization and the professionalized infrastructure is exactly the need that we're serving.

Yeah, so let's let's dive into that that niche that Blur has really optimized for. So optimized for NFT traders as opposed to collectors? Can you just help uh help me understand the the uh area of the NFT world that Blur has really uh carved out?

Totally. So, you know, I think when you're like a newcomer to NFTs, the existing marketplaces that, you know, were all here prior to Blur, they really served that use case well. You know, they treated NFTs as a more traditional shopping experience, right? Like what you would see on Amazon or eBay or Craigslist. And it worked really well for the dabblers.

But if you're a very active collector or if you're a trader, you really want to buy in size.

You want to be able to monitor the market in real time. A lot of these collections, they can, you know, the floor can shift very quickly on you, right? It can go down or up.

And especially for the hot collections, there can be oftentimes.

So many orders happening at once that, you know, prior to Blur, all of these platforms would just crash when the market got really hot and wouldn't even be able to support even basic levels of trading. And that was because these marketplaces really treated NFTs as a shopping experience, which again works for the retail user or the beginner, but for someone who's very active in the space and is trying to take a position and move quickly in the market. They want something that's more akin to, you know, whenever you use an advanced token trading exchange, you have a real-time order book, you have a live order speed, right? As trades are happening, you're seeing that all update live, the depth charts updating live, you're able to chart things, you know, very quickly, uh, see a lot of data all at once, all updating in real time. And really before Blur, that kind of experience in the marketplace just did not exist. So that's really the key focus of Blur from day one. You'll notice, even from our early tweet announcements or blog posts, we've always made it very clear that we're focused on building the best NFT marketplace for pro traders.

Right. Okay. So you are optimizing for people who are really leaning into the financial net aspects of these NFTs, where these NFTs are tokens, hence they are yeah, have some sort of financial aspect to them where other people might just be perusing uh through open seeds, like, oh, I guess I like that one, I guess I'll add it to my cart. This is not what Blur is optimized for, or Blur has optimized for the power user of the NFT industry. Is that a fair description?

Exactly. Yeah. I would say, you know, in a similar way to

When you look at why someone would buy Bitcoin or ETH or any other token, there might be some utility to it. There might be, you know, maybe it's ultrasound money, maybe it's something else. But ultimately, the exchanges that these tokens trade on, they're really focused on serving the core financial need of trading the token around, you know, the speculation. And that's not in like a negative right, right? In any

market, there's hedgers and speculators, and the exchanges serve matching the needs of the hedgers and the speculators. And ultimately, when when we think about what do we

Bring to the table

for Blur as a protocol and marketplace. It's really about making that market more liquid, more efficient, enabling it to grow, just like the advanced exchange infrastructure and tokens really allowed the space to grow as well.

Yeah, so I was looking at some Dune Analytics Boards before we hopped into this uh live stream here and and I'll repeat the uh numbers that I said at the beginning. A billion dollars in total volume, over a billion trades, uh and almost a hundred thousand active users. W what has Blur built that attracted all of that volume, attracted all of the that trading activity? Uh so if we're talking talking about building an NFT marketplace that's really optimized for the power user, let's talk about the details as to what that what that means. What has Blur built that has allowed for all of this these power users to really be power users?

Yeah, totally. And you know, David, I'm really glad that you did your research. It was it was a billion. It was actually over a billion, 1.2 billion. Um, there's a really great analytics chart from uh Hill Dobby, who um I can share that afterwards. He does some really great analysis.

Uh, but I think the

The right way to think about it is just to imagine the token trading market.

If

any of the more crypto native exchanges beyond Coinbase didn't exist, right? Like if Binance didn't exist, BitMEX, Derabit, you know, any of these exchanges, just imagine just buying on, you know, buying and selling Bitcoin on Coinbase consumer.

That's basically what the state of the market was about 394 days ago when we started working on Blur. And

That

infrastructure was what was serving the NFT market as it was doing, you know, $4 billion worth of trading volume every month at its peak. So there was just a massive, massive need for

even just basic, more professionalized infrastructure.