Blur Exploits Seaport Loophole to Bypass OpenSea’s Blocklist Control

The highly incentivised NFT marketplace failed to comply with OpenSea’s creator fee policy for enforcing royalties on all collections.
Image source: OpenSea/Blur

Quick take:

  • Blur has managed to bypass OpenSea’s blocklist control for NFT platforms that do not respect creator royalties.
  • The NFT aggregator marketplace used a loophole in Seaport, an open-source web3 marketplace protocol launched in June 2022.
  • Blur has now created a secondary exchange on its platform linked to Seaport.

Blur has managed to bypass OpenSea’s blocklist control for NFT marketplaces that do not comply with its creator fee policy. The highly incentivised NFT marketplace found a loophole in Seaport, an open-source web3 marketplace protocol introduced by OpenSea in June 2022.

Blur said the new changes will be part of its upcoming $BLUR token airdrop scheduled for February. The company had initially planned to airdrop the token in January.

Explaining the reason for the delayed airdrop, Blur wrote: “We are trying new things and the extra two weeks will allow us to deliver a launch that hasn’t been done before.”

The announcement comes at the back of a growing raw between OpenSea and Blur about enforcing creator royalties. In October, after Blur failed to comply with OpenSea’s creator fee policy, it unsuccessfully tried to remove itself from the blocklist. 

But now, the platform seems to have found a foolproof loophole to bypass the blocklist control, crypto and NFT data analyst Panda Jackson reported on Twitter.

OpenSea launched its on-chain creator fee enforcement tool in November last year, requiring all NFT marketplaces looking to list NFTs dropped on the platform to enforce royalty fees on all collections (new and old). 

However, Blur was only willing to implement that policy on new NFT collections. As a result, the platform remained on OpenSea’s blocklist.

This created a dilemma for creators, with OpenSea making its collections ineligible to trade on Blur, whereas those who chose to list their collection on Blur forfeited receiving royalty fees on OpenSea.

However, because Seaport is not on OpenSea’s blocklist, it means NFT marketplaces can list collections from the platform without getting blocked. The decentralised marketplace protocol is open source and has been used by several NFT marketplaces to launch their platforms.

Both Blur and OpenSea use Seaport, meaning if OpenSea blocked Seaport to prevent Blur from listing collections from the platform, then it will also be blocking itself according to Panda Jackson on Twitter.

Blur has grown over the past few months to become OpenSea’s biggest competitor. According to a Dune Analytics dashboard created by @sealaunch, Blur is slightly edging OpenSea in terms of transaction volume by fill source with more than 42% compared to OpenSea’s 39%.

Source: Dune Analytics/@sealaunch

The rest of the NFT marketplaces split the remaining 18% as of January 31, 2023.

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