OpenSea regains market dominance in the ETH NFT marketplace

• OpenSea has launched XP shipments, a new rewards model targeted at early adopters of its OS2 marketplace.
• The marketplace is still aimed at rewarding purchasers and holders instead of the traders looking to use the platform.
• As rivalry with Blur carries on, the capability of OpenSea to refine its rewards model will be critical in keeping its regained market share. 

The world’s first and largest marketplace for NFTs, OpenSea has gained dominance in the Ethereum NFT marketplace once again and it has acquired 71.5% of the market share this last week. 

One month ago, it acquired just 25.5% with Blur leading the market. The hype is followed by the publicization of OpenSea of its predicted native token $SEA on February 13. Since its publicization, the daily trading volume of OpenSea has gone up with an average of $17.4 million. 

This is almost five times its pre-publicization average of about $3.47 million. The transactions on a daily basis also doubled, increasing from 6,100 to 14,700 trades. The majority of the growth was driven only from the past week, as the market share of OpenSea went up from 42.4% to 71.5%, driving the volume away from Blur. 

Regardless of this pace, the platform has witnessed challenges with its incentive launch. OpenSea put a halt on its XP-based reward system after getting criticism from users. The majority of the users claimed that the system promoted wash trading and gave priority to fee production over real engagement. 

Replying to that, OpenSea launched XP shipments, a new rewards model targeted at early adopters of its OS2 marketplace. Users who gave feedback on Discord got the first batch of XP rewards. 

The second round is being allotted to those who bought NFTs on OS2. Adding more to this, XP multipliers are available for users who possessed top-volume NFT accumulations for over three months. 

This move targets to encourage sustainable involvement instead of artificial trading activity. The SEA token is still mainly unrevealed, but OpenSea accepted that U.S. users qualify for the airdrop. 

Distribution will be grounded on the last platform activity, profiting traders who were active at the time of the 2021 NFT bull run. This could offer a major incentive for long-run users to return and be involved with the platform. 

The marketplace is still aimed at rewarding purchasers and holders instead of the traders looking to use the platform. As rivalry with Blur carries on, the capability of OpenSea to refine its rewards model will be critical in keeping its regained market share.