Blur Got the Feedback Loop Wrong (1 minute read)
By incentivizing users to stay liquid and continuously bid, NFT marketplace Blur may have had the lowest floors, but at the cost of incrementally devaluing NFTs on its platform. Activity on the marketplace, which rewards users with BLUR tokens, was an effective strategy to capture market share and volume in the short term, but it was not strong enough to keep competitor Magic Eden from doubling its daily trading volume and becoming the leading NFT marketplace by revenue. Part of this is due to Magic Eden’s adoption of Bitcoin Ordinals instead of Blur’s focus on Ethereum mainnet.
Commoditising Your Complements With Modular Architecture (17 minute read)
The commoditization of blockchain infrastructure, enabled by more competitors and options in the modular stack, is catalyzing a new wave of customized, application-specific rollups. By leveraging components like data availability layers (Celestia, Avail, and EigenDA), rollup SDKs (Sovereign and RollKit), and shared sequencers (Astria and Espresso), developers can focus on optimizing applications without the burden of managing the entire stack. At the same time, infrastructure providers can increase demand for their products and protocols by decreasing the cost of using them by commoditizing the complements or tools an application relies on.