Mon 02/20

Good Morning. Indian art fair adopts NFTs, OpenSea introduces a zero fee policy in a controversial move, Ordinals has inflated bitcoin block size and blur has overtaken Opensea. Happy Monday People!

🎥 India Art Fair Goes Tech With NFTs: With the rise of digital art, the 14th Indian Art fair in Okhla now includes a dedicated space called The Studio that showcases tech-art projects and installations. The space features works from "Digital Artists in Residence," who created pieces using iPad Pros based on the theme "Finding the Extraordinary in the Ordinary." For example, in Mira Felicia Malhotra's "Log Kya Kahenge," the artist explores the peculiarities of Indian family life and asks viewers to use an iPad to watch the moving images. Gaurav Ogale's "Bestsellers" is an audio-visual anthology series that invites viewers to explore the biographies of ordinary people, while Varun Desai's immersive projection room offers a glimpse into a future where artificial intelligence and human consciousness are fused. The fair also features video and tech-inspired artwork from contemporary artists like Julien Segard, Payal Arya, and Aditi Kulkarni. Additionally, the outdoor projects include a timeline of computational art that features NFT artworks.

👌🏻 Opensea Has Implemented A Zero-fee Policy: OpenSea, a leading marketplace for non-fungible tokens (NFTs), announced on Friday that it will temporarily remove its marketplace fee, intensifying the competition for market share with the popular no-fee marketplace, Blur. In addition, OpenSea has updated its blocklist of other marketplaces that do not honor full royalty payments to creators, enabling sales on NFT marketplaces with the same policies. This change includes Blur, which is no longer forcing creators to choose between the two platforms to earn full royalties on its collections. OpenSea has described this as the beginning of a new era for the marketplace. Recently, Blur’s trading volume surpassed OpenSea for the first time since it went live in October.

🔨 The Impact Of Ordinals On Bitcoin Mempools & Transaction Size: Recent Glassnode data indicates that the aftermath of Ordinals has positively impacted Bitcoin. However, the data also highlights that there are certain factors to be taken into account with regard to the overall health of the Bitcoin network. One example is the fact that the average transaction size has increased significantly, by more than 100%, from 600 bytes to 1100 bytes. Additionally, the data from Glassnode shows that the upper range of Bitcoin's average block size has also increased considerably since the introduction of Ordinals, going from 1.5-2.0 megabytes to 3.0-3.5 megabytes in just a few weeks. This increase appears to be related not only to images but also to larger files such as audio and video that are now being stored using Ordinals.

Blur.io Burns 252 ETH To Hit Top Of Burn Leaderboard: In the past 24 hours, the NFT marketplace aggregator Blur has become the leading consumer of Ethereum, surpassing Uniswap, OpenSea, and Ethereum transactions. According to data provided by Access Protocol CEO Mika Honkasalo from Ultrasoundmoney, the activity on Blur resulted in the burning of 252 ETH between Feb. 18 and Feb. 19. In comparison, Uniswap and OpenSea consumed 239.39 ETH and 177.8 ETH, respectively. Ultrasoundmoney identified two contracts associated with Blur that consumed a total of 310.7 ETH. However, when Uniswap V2 and V3 contracts are combined, they consumed a total of 328 ETH, narrowly overtaking Blur to become the top ETH burner.