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

Coverage on the Blur, OpenSea, Sudoswap, and Ordinals.

• TVL of Blur's Bidding Pool has increased to 77k ETH (130m USD) as of February 23rd, representing a 3.2x increase from the pre-token launch size. The pool's deposits have grown along with the platform's trading volume. 80% of the inflow were made by airdrop recipients, indicating the positive impact of the Blur token launch and second season airdrop incentive on the marketplace's growth.

• Examining the airdrop distribution, 35k recipients received less than 100 Blur tokens while 5.5k users received more than 10,000 tokens. The median amount of airdrop tokens is less than 300, which is only 1/10 of the average.

• After a decline in retention rate to below 10%, Blur saw a rebound after their token launch. The first week retention was 35% and gradually decreased. However, the launch led to a rebound with a retention rate of 20-30% for all user groups.

• In the last 60 days, OpenSea lost some unique buyers to Blur and the average number of trades per user declined slightly. In other words, a group of NFT traders began shifting from using OpenSea to using Blur, and current users are trading more on average on Blur than on OpenSea as was the case before. This is likely influenced by Blur airdrop strategy (and its season 2 trading incentives).

• Although Blur surpassed OpenSea in terms of volume market share, in the last 120D, ~15% of OpenSea volume originated from the trading of 8 collections (CryptoPunks, BAYC, Otherdeed, MAYC, Meebits, Moonbirds, CloneX, Doodles).

• In comparison, ~41% of Blur’s volume originated in these same collections. OpenSea volume originates from a higher number of collections as well as from a higher number of users (while in Blur there is a bigger concentration in collections/users that have an impact on volume), suggesting OpenSea still has a deeper supply-side of collections.

• Since the beginning of the year, Sudoswap has generated close to $16m in total volume and $426k in pool fees. However, there has been a drop in volume since February, compared to a peak of $700k in volume on January 19th. Currently, the platform holds only about 1% of the total NFT volume across all marketplaces due to Blur's airdrop explosion.

• The $SUDO token was released on February 10. $SUDO was airdropped to ~2.9k XMON holders, 221 0xmons NFT holders, and ~1.6k LPs. On average, XMON holders received the most amount of $SUDO tokens, 8,520, compared to 0xmons holders and LPs which received 4,072 and 563 $SUDO, on average, respectively.

• Around 70 unique NFT projects are traded on Sudoswap daily. However, just 10 projects have contributed to 50% of the platform's total volume over the past few months. Total pool fees across all projects have been generating anywhere from 2k – 7k on a given day.

• While initial momentum of minting (inscribing) has slowed from the 20k a day peak, there are still 5k mints a day. Image and text content are leading the way, making up 99% of mints. To find out more about how Bitcoin NFTs, Ordinals, and Inscriptions are related, check out this guide that explains the query behind the chart.

• There have been 3 inscriptions the full size of a Bitcoin block (4MB inscription). Most inscriptions are much smaller though, paying a cheap fee of 2 sats per virtual byte.

• Inscriptions have generated $1.25m in fee revenue for Bitcoin so far. It has also increased taproot adoption (a new transaction/address type) up to 10% at its peak. Most future Bitcoin applications will be built off of taproot, so pushing its adoption is as important as the promotion of segwit.