NFT sales volume skyrocketed in February to highs not seen since the onset of crypto winter last spring, according to data from DappRadar.
Trading surpassed a whopping $2.04 billion last month, up 117% from $941 million in January.
Those figures make February the best month the NFT market has seen since last May when Terra’s implosion cratered the crypto economy and buried the then-red-hot NFT market in ice.
The surge, though, appears indebted almost entirely to a single, controversial source: Blur.
The emergent NFT marketplace, which just this month surpassed OpenSea in trading volume, has fueled its rapid rise to dominance with incentives that financially reward loyal users for refraining from trading on any other platform, and—crucially—for trading as many high-value NFTs as possible.
Blur’s trading volume jumped over $1.13 billion in February from the month prior, a stunning statistic that accounts for almost all of the entire NFT market’s month-over-month gains.
But the majority of that volume was generated by a small number of whales flipping NFTs back and forth and back again, to accumulate BLUR tokens through the company’s incentives scheme.