Blur

Blur’s first version opened in October 2022 around fast collection data, bids and portfolio execution. Its interface treated NFTs as positions to compare and trade, a direct challenge to marketplaces designed around browsing one item at a time.

Pacman worked under a pseudonym until a personal post on February 22, 2023 identified him as Tieshun Roquerre. A contemporaneous interview records that he and another cofounder launched the first Blur marketplace in October 2022. The reviewed sources do not establish the second cofounder’s identity.

Blur did not wait for BLUR to make incentives matter. Care Packages and points rewarded activity and loyalty, teaching traders that bids and listings could later become an allocation. On February 14, 2023, 360 million BLUR—12% of genesis supply—became claimable by eligible traders across marketplaces, creators and historical users.

The design bought attention and order-book depth while also choosing the first governors. It could encourage genuine liquidity and reward-chasing behavior at the same time. A later token allocation does not tell which motive produced an individual trade.

The Foundation says all 3 billion BLUR were minted at genesis. It allocated 51% to community members, 29% to current and future core contributors, 19% to investors and 1% to advisors, with four-to-five-year release schedules and cliffs.

Votes do not appear automatically in a wallet balance: holders delegate to register voting power. Ideas spend at least seven days in research, then face 14 days on Snapshot and another 14 days onchain. The final stage documents a 120 million yes-vote quorum and a two-day execution delay.

Governance can set marketplace fees up to 2.5%, lending fees, treasury grants and its own timing rules. Yet the system did not hand every fast decision to token ballots. A Safety Committee can stop proposals that skipped process; a Marketplace Committee facilitates exchange, aggregator and lending upgrades and royalty policy; an Incentive Committee manages a 300 million BLUR budget.

That split explains why BLUR governance is real but bounded. The token contract is also only one address. Exchange versions, aggregator, bid pool and Blend have separate contracts and proxy surfaces, so the absence of a function on BLUR says nothing universal about the applications.

On May 1, 2023, Dan Robinson, transmissions11, Galaga, Toad and Pacman published Blend. A lender signs an offchain offer naming an NFT collection, principal and interest rate. A borrower accepts, locks an NFT and receives ETH. The loan has no fixed expiry and interest continues until someone acts.

The borrower can repay at any time. A lender who wants out may submit a compatible replacement offer immediately or start an auction at 0% interest; the offered rate rises until a new lender repays the old one and takes over. If no lender appears by the maximum rate, refinancing fails and the old lender may take the NFT. The credit market’s refusal, rather than an oracle’s floor price, is the liquidation signal.

The Blend paper assigns borrower and lender fees, the maximum auction interest rate and the auction formula to BLUR governance after a described 180-day waiting period. Those rules define which parameters voters may adjust; the paper alone does not establish a calendar date when the powers became available. Governance does not choose each lender’s offer or value each NFT.

On November 11, 2024, Split Capital posted BIP-1 in Blur’s forum. It proposed replacing the enforced 0.5% creator royalty with a 0.5% protocol fee, adding a fee council and creating veBLUR. The page repeatedly says ‘we propose’ and supplies no adopted Snapshot or executable payload. The linked onchain portal lists only two executed 2023 proposals and is itself marked archived with potentially stale data. Together those records show debate, not verified implementation.