The shift in NFT marketplace dominance and liquidity layers
Magic Eden maintains market leadership in NFT volume and royalties while expanding to the Base network. Meanwhile, the Blur team is shutting down its Blast blockchain following the failure of Pudgy Party, which saw active users drop to as low as 200.
The failure of Blur and its associated ecosystems
The decision by the Blur team to shut down its Ethereum layer-2 blockchain, Blast, comes because the team determined that the network cost more to operate than it earned. This shutdown follows the failure of Igloo’s Pudgy Party mobile game, which lost millions of dollars after its active user count fell to 200 or 300. Users have until December 15 to move assets from the chain before they become inaccessible, as DefiLlama estimates $76 million in assets remain on the chain. Ledger claims that at least one affected device contained an unauthorized hardware implant, where a chip and antenna were added to capture crypto wallet seed phrases and transmit the data to the attacker using a cellular connection. Other projects also face instability, such as Abracadabra, where treasury wallets moved $8.3 million in MIM to a Binance deposit address in July after a low-participation vote handed stewardship to a different group.
Magic Eden expansion on Base
Magic Eden remains the most popular NFT marketplace because it holds the highest users, revenue, volume, and royalties from the past week. The platform now supports minting and trading on Base to capture the L2 NFT scene, which contains a major portion of all L2 NFT activity. While OpenSea remains the primary platform for primary drops and secondary trading on Base, Magic Eden provides an alternative for collections like Onchain Gaias, Tiny Based Frogs, Bomefers, and Primitives. Magic Eden also released three new drops on Base. Offline Oracles launches 5,500 NFTs at 0.05 ETH each on April 25, and Buddies includes 2,222 PFAs at 0.004 ETH each on April 26. The JOUR mint is an open edition at 0.001 ETH for 48 hours starting April 26. You should track Diamond Rewards for Base NFTs to maximize gains. Will Magic Eden capture the full Base market share from OpenSea?
Genius Trading and cross-chain competition
Genius Trading, developed by Shuttle Labs, provides multi-chain aggregation and the Genius Bridge Protocol. YZi Labs invested an eight-figure sum into the project, and Zhao Changpeng serves as an advisor. The project founders include CEO Armaan Kalsi, COO Ryan Myher, and CTO Brihu Sundararaman. The platform integrates chains like Solana, Ethereum, Avalanche, Base, Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, BNB Chain, Sui, and HyperEVM. Users log in via Apple, Google, or a wallet. The protocol uses multi-party computation to split orders across hundreds of wallets to provide privacy.
| Tier | Volume Requirement | Additional Trades | Cashback |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | $10,000 | 10 | 0% |
| 2 | $100,000 | 100 | 0% |
| 3 | $500,000 | 1,000 | 0% |
| 4 | $1,000,000 | 2,500 | 20% |
| 5 | $5,000,000 | 5,000 | 30% |
| 6 | $20,000,000 | 7,500 | 40% |
| 7 | $50,000,000 | 15,000 | 50% |
| 8 | $100,000,000 | 30,000 | 60% |
Season 1 rewards run from January 15 to March 16, 2026, with 200 million GP points available. The program distributes 20 million points every week. Users earn 1 GP for every $100 in spot trading volume and 1 GP for every $1000 in perpetual contract volume. To earn a streak multiplier, users must trade for seven consecutive days. Referral rewards provide 30% of all trading fees from first-level referrals, 10% from second-level referrals, 5% from third-level referrals, and 1% from fourth-level referrals. When an invited friend reaches $1,000 in trading volume, the invitor receives 500 GP. If the friend reaches $10,000, the invitor gets 3,000 GP, while $100,000 in volume provides 5,000 GP and $1 million in volume provides 15,000 GP. Higher volume traders also receive cashback, such as the 60% cashback available for Tier 8 traders who reach $100 million in volume.
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