Welcome to “The Chopping Block” – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Robert Leshner, Tom Schmidt, and Tarun Chitra chop it up about the latest news. This week, it’s time for a case study: Special guest Pacman, founder of Blur, explains how his upstart NFT marketplace fought OpenSea and won.

Show highlights: 

• what it’s like to launch a token
• why Blur was created and what its strategy was for competing with OpenSea
• why royalties remain a lightning rod in the NFT community
• how Blur designed its liquidity mining program and the lesson learned from failed designs
• the reasons why Blur succeeded in the NFT marketplace environment
• Pacman’s reaction to OpenSea’s decision to not enforce royalties
• why forking the Blur code won’t work for new marketplace competitors
• why the NFT market remained strong in the depths of a bear market
• why Pacman thinks AMMs for NFTs won’t work
• whether the “death of royalties” is good or bad for the ecosystem

Hosts

• Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly 
• Tarun Chitra, managing partner at Robot Ventures
• Robert Leshner, founder of Compound 
• Tom Schmidt, general partner at Dragonfly 

Guest

Pacman, founder of Blur

• Twitter

Disclosures

Previous coverage on NFT royalties:

• The Chopping Block: Two on Two Debate: NFT Royalty Throwdown!
• Are NFT Royalties the Way? How to Build a Sustainable Creator Economy

Links

• Dune: Blur VS OpenSea
• Blog post: How to earn royalties on Blur
• OpenSea’s response
• Unchained: 
• OpenSea Eliminates Marketplace Fee, Makes Creator Royalties Optional
• Blur Airdrops 360M Tokens to NFT Traders

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