- Blur’s co-founder, Tieshun Roquerre, recently revealed his identity after the platform’s community grew exponentially.
- Blur, an upstart NFT aggregator, has recently overtaken OpenSea to become the top NFT marketplace.
- OpenSea has faced criticism for backing away from mandatory creator royalty collection and has recently made changes to match Blur’s zero transaction fees and optional resale royalties.
Blur, a new NFT aggregator, has made waves in the world of cryptocurrency in recent months, surpassing industry giant OpenSea in trading volume and skyrocketing to the top of the non-fungible token marketplace rankings. But perhaps just as notable as its meteoric rise is the recent revelation of the company’s founder and co-founder, Tieshun Roquerre, also known as Pacman.
Meet Tieshun Roquerre, the Founder of Blur
Roquerre, a 24-year-old entrepreneur, has built a career in the crypto industry, dropping out of both high school and MIT to create his own companies. He took one of these companies through Y Combinator and later founded Namebase, a Web3 firm that he sold to Namecheap. Now, with the success of Blur, Roquerre has become a prominent figure in the NFT space.
Despite building a successful career in the industry, Roquerre had previously preferred to remain anonymous, using a pseudonym and revealing his identity only in private calls when necessary. In a recent statement, Roquerre explained his decision to reveal his true identity publicly, stating that he enjoyed the privacy of being pseudo but had to share his identity now that Blur’s community had grown exponentially.
Blur’s success is undeniable. The NFT aggregator has seen $1.9 billion in sales from more than 150,000 traders, with almost $640 million of it in the last seven days alone, and its 24-hour trading volume has surpassed that of OpenSea, the industry’s long-standing leader, by a wide margin. However, some industry insiders have questioned the legitimacy of Blur’s trading volume, as traders have been gaming the platform’s BLUR rewards system by trading the same tokens over and over again.
Royalty Collection Controversy
Blur has taken a different approach to creator royalties, announcing on Feb. 15 that it would collect mandatory royalties on any NFT collection whose creators blocked sales on OpenSea. Blur said this was a defensive tactic that would end when OpenSea stopped refusing to enforce royalty collection if tokens were sold on Blur and other non-whitelist sites. “Creators that whitelist both OpenSea and Blur should be able to earn royalties on both platforms,” Blur said in a blog post. “Today, OpenSea automatically sets royalties to optional when they detect trading on Blur.”
