DeFi
Blur Drops 7% After Machi Big Brother Moves All Its Tokens to Binance
A wallet belonging to Jeffrey “Machi Big Brother” Huang transferred all of his BLUR, or about $3.1 million, to centralized crypto exchange Binance early this morning, according to data on string.
Earlier this morning, amid apparent selling on Binance, BLUR dropped as low as $0.1596. It has since recovered slightly; at the time of writing, BLUR is trading at $0.1621, down 7.2% on the day, according to data from CoinGecko.
BLUR is the native token of the Blur NFT trading and lending marketplace, which launched in 2022 with backing from crypto venture capital heavyweight Paradigm. At one point, Blur accounted for at least 62% of all NFT trading volume, according to DappRadar.
But since then, activity on its platform has dropped sharply. The NFT marketplace has also become a controversial player in the NFT space, fire drawing for a model that critics say incentivizes traders to sell their NFTs.
Huang is not a founder or executive of Blur, but he is one of the platform’s largest lenders. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Decrypt.
Huang’s portfolio movements were reported on Spoton Chain and seem to correspond to the entity profile that blockchain analytics platform Arkham Intelligence compiled for Machi. But the transfers probably weren’t a complete surprise to the NFT platform’s community.
Last week, Huang was discussing the Blur DAO Discord Server about the growing unrest over the token’s price drop, with users questioning its value. In the past month alone, BLUR has fallen 52% from $0.34, according to data from CoinGecko.
In a message, Huang appeared to seek clarification on how the BLUR Airdrop had been distributed among farmers, operators and what part had been reserved for governance.
In response to his post, another community member advised him to sell his BLUR tokens to buy BLAST tokens instead.
“This makes perfect sense right now, $blur has a higher mc than $blast,” they added. Huang replied: “I thought about it.”
Blast is a layer 2 Ethereum network launched by the founder of Blur Tieshun Roquerrewho calls himself Pacman online. Blast’s main appeal is that it offers “native yield for Ethereum and stablecoins,” allowing users bet (or lock) their funds in the network to earn an interest-like return.
The two projects aren’t related, aside from sharing a founder. But Blur users have complained that the NFT marketplace and its token holders sometimes feel like an afterthought.
A few hours later, on Blur’s Discord server, Huang sent a message saying he was having trouble by removing his bet BLUR tokens. He came back 20 minutes later say that a link shared by a moderator had worked. It was the last message he had sent to the server on July 5.