About the editor: Spencer Noon is co-founder of Variant Fund. If you fit one of these personas, reply to this email and say hi 👋

• NFT market volume hit a YTD high of $130M on February 22nd, with Blur's volume exceeding $100M due to airdrops. Despite this, trading volume declined to $70M in March, $35M in early April, and $30M in early May. The number of transactions peaked at 117K in March, but dropped to 60K in April, and further declined to 15K since May of 2023.

• From May 1st, 2023, Blur entered the non-doubling phase and also introduced Blend. In the period from March to May, Blur's share by fill source experienced a 5-10% decrease after the launch of OpenSea Pro, but as of May 1st 2023, its share had recovered to 71%.

• Blur's daily transactions declined from ATH 66.5K in February to 3.4K in May. OpenSea & Pro's transactions were 30K per day in March, 24K in April, and 7.8K in May. Blur's daily volume decreased from ATH 103M on February 22nd to $10M on April 29th. OpenSea average daily volume was $10.5M in March and $9M in April.

• In a bid to streamline the process of loaning NFTs, Blur has collaborated with Paradigm to launch Blend a few days ago, their new cutting-edge NFT lending protocol. As one of the largest marketplaces in terms of volume, this offering has attracted additional liquidity into the NFT market. Blur's lending platform has demonstrated positive early traction, with 18,000 ETH in loan originations across 1,770 loans in just a few days.

• Among the NFTs used as collateral on Blur's lending platform, Milady's NFTs have the highest number of loans at 203, while Azuki's NFTs have the highest loan volume with approximately 2,500 ETH borrowed against them.

  

• Lending activity on Blur's platform has been occupied by a small group of market participants. Out of the 430 active loans, the top 5 lenders account for 34% of total loans (150) and 56% of total loan volume (2,696 ETH).

• To examine OpenSea's user landscape, consider the top 1%, 5%, and 10% of NFT traders by volume, with those not in the top 10% deemed "Normal" users. OpenSea's volume is primarily driven by Normal users (64%), with the the top 1% contributing 24% to the total volume. On the other hand, Blur's volume is led by the the top 1% of NFT traders (69.5%), with Normal users accounting for 18% of total volume. This highlights the clear difference in user base distribution between the two platforms.

  

• Besides volume, it’s interesting to see how these user groups contribute to the number of trades on each marketplace. OpenSea sees 80% of trades from Normal users, and the top 1% of NFT traders represent 9.1% of trades. Conversely, Blur sees 49% of trades from Normal users, with the top 1% and 5% of NFT traders representing 45% of trades.

• OpenSea's volume, trades and user base are primarily driven by normal users, while Blur's platform sees a higher concentration of activity from the top NFT traders in terms of volume traded.

  

• Reservoir is NFT trading infrastructure that aggregates and normalizes the NFT market into a single unified platform. It aggregates NFT liquidity across over 100 NFT marketplaces. Around 81% of token floors are from optional-royalty or NFT lending platforms. Reservoir also supports native orders, which contributes around 400 ETH volume and 1,018 trades weekly. Ordinals excitement is reflected with their volume increasing from 13.02 ETH up to 921.24 ETH.

• Reservoir enables community marketplaces to launch without a liquidity cold start. There are 86 active community marketplaces built on Reservoir, capturing 3,535 ETH volume, 18,242 sales and 8,305 users last month. Due to the OE edition mania, Zora is the leader with 4,608 sales and 145 average users.

• ENS Vision is one of the most notable Reservoir ecosystem marketplaces for ENS domain sales. Though weekly vol declined from 1,249 ETH to 65 ETH as NFT market falls, ENS Vision keeps around 50% of ENS market share and outpaces that of Opensea, becoming one of the most popular ENS trading platform.

• In April, LooksRare V2 launched with new features such as 0.5% trading fees, optimized gas fees, and ETH rewards. The platform processed $169.54M in total volume in the month of April, of which ~60%+ is identified as wash trading. While volume is increasing, the number of trades has been decreasing monthly, with only 2.8K trades in April.

  

• LooksRare's NFT market share increased to 11.4% following the launch of V2. Excluding wash trades, the platform claimed 6.3% of the “organic” volume market share in April. Despite this, LooksRare only accounted for 0.2% of the total trades for NFTs.

  

• 729 LooksRare wallets bought an NFT in April. The platform's volume is concentrated amongst a few users. Six wallets drove 96% of the total volume in the past month. An intriguing trend that has boosted volume on LooksRare is users utilizing flash loans to earn $LOOKS tokens.