Blur proposal suggests adding trading fees and eliminating creator fee guarantees

Split Capital, a liquid token hedge fund, said on Monday it had submitted a governance proposal to Blur, asking the NFT marketplace to adopt a new fee structure of 0.5% on trading while also eliminating the enforcement of a 0.5% creator royalty.

"To date, the Blur NFT marketplace protocol has had 0% marketplace fees while enforcing 0.5% minimum creator royalties," the proposal reads. "We propose to remove enforced creator royalties and add a 0.5% protocol fee on every trade."

In late 2022, Blur overtook OpenSea to become the biggest NFT marketplace by trading volume after it offered highly active traders generous token rewards on top of charging 0% fees for trades. Blur's aggressive move upended the NFT market and was disastrous for OpenSea, which has since tried to pivot to a similar model of charging less and promising to pay creators less.

Split Captial's new proposal also opens the door to future fee increases, stating, "We also propose the creation of a fee council that can change the protocol fee rate to be able to make quick adjustments based on market circumstances and the competitive landscape."

New token structure

Shortly after Split Capital posted on X that it had submitted the proposal to Blur's governance, the marketplace's BLUR token jumped over 15% to about $0.29 as of 1:51 p.m. ET, according to The Block Price Page.

Split Capital is also proposing an alteration to Blur's tokenomics. "We propose to change the BLUR tokenomics to use two tokens to manage Blur’s utility and governance," it said in the post. The hedge fund suggests using BLUR as the "utility token of the protocol" and veBLUR as a governance token in the form of an NFT.