About the editor: Spencer Noon is Co-founder & General Partner at Variant Fund. Web3 founder looking to connect? Reply back to this email.

Andrew Hong (one of our OG contributors & creator of ON Learn) just dropped an awesome post on web3 data tooling—and it’s a must read:

[2023] Guide to Web3 Data Tools

It’s been another year, albeit feels like a decade has passed! I recommend reading my 2022 guide first since most concepts are still contextually relevant. This year’s guide will cover the same three pillars but with new perspectives: Tools: organizing data tools based on utility

Web3 Data Degens

Coverage on Blur, X2Y2, LooksRare, and OpenSea.

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• Volume market share of Blur, a recently launched NFT Marketplace and aggregator, saw a steep increase at the beginning of December, and during the last 30 days it has been consistently above 50% (some days passing 60%), as shown on sealaunch Dune Dashboard. Volume may be influenced due to $BLUR airdrop to happen at the end of January. The question that arises is if Blur will continue to attract this level of volume after the airdrop, but also if it will use $BLUR to introduce new incentives to trading.

• Although Blur surpassed OpenSea volume market share, OpenSea continues to be the NFT Marketplace that attracts more users, with a market share of 65% to 75%. Blur has sustained a stable number of daily users, solidifying its position as the second most popular NFT marketplace in number of users.

• Blur's volume spiked at the end of October with the launch of Art Gobblers (also backed by Paradigm). Blur positions itself as an “NFT marketplace for pro traders” and was able to attract this type of users (that usually also trade blue-chip NFT) in the last 30 days at a higher rate than OpenSea.

• X2Y2 is the original 0 royalty marketplace and had a strong run of increasing volumes in the second half of 2022. Since Blur launched, X2Y2 has lost market share, slipping from 14% to 8% total share. This decrease is substantial but less severe than OpenSea, which saw a 50% decline. The important variable to watch moving forward is X2Y2’s share of non-blur volume, which sits steady at 15.5%, up slightly from 14% in October. Blur volume remains noisy pre token liquidity.

• X2Y2 launched P2P lending in late 2022 into an anemic market. It has seen solid usage thus far, originating >2,500 unique loans. Competitors like BendDAO provide higher liquidity with a P2Contract setup, so absolute number of loans is the main KPI to compete on the longer tail of collections.

• Azuki & Beanz made up 9.5% of the last 10 days of X2Y2 volume compared to only 2.3% of OpenSea’s 10 day volume. Concentrated volumes are common with NFT marketplaces (like BAYC/MAYC on LooksRare in early 2022), but reducing reliance on certain collections is critical for sustained volume.

• LooksRare is an NFT marketplace platform that launched last year to challenge OpenSea by providing lower fees and offering the $LOOKS tokens. LooksRare distributes the trading fees of the platform to the stakers of $LOOKS. Since inception, the platform has seen over $26b in trading volume and ~$550m in trading fees. However, volume has decreased by 95% since its peak. 98% of LooksRare’s volume is related to wash trading. This would leave the platform with only ~$550m in organic volume.

• Only a few wash traders compose most of Look’s volume. The top 10 wallets (by buying volume) are responsible for 94% of the total volume in the past 180 days for LooksRare. The top two wallets which trade back and forth compose 40% of the total volume. The top 15 wallets compose only 6% of LooksRare’s total trades.

• Since July, LooksRare has seen 100-300 trades and 80-200 unique users per day. LooksRare had a spike on December 5, where activity increased by 25x to 2.6k trades. This was due to a partnership with Layer3 to drive activity towards $LOOKS and the platform. The price of $LOOKs increased 30% leading up to it.