Welcome to “The Chopping Block” – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Robert Leshner, Tom Schmidt, and Tarun Chitra chop it up about the latest news. This week, it’s time for a case study: Special guest Pacman, founder of Blur, explains how his upstart NFT marketplace fought OpenSea and won. Show highlights:  what it’s like to launch a token why Blur was created and what its strategy was for competing with OpenSea why royalties remain a lightning rod in the NFT community how Blur designed its liquidity mining program and the lesson learned from failed designs the reasons why Blur succeeded in the NFT marketplace environment Pacman’s reaction to OpenSea’s decision to not enforce royalties why forking the Blur code won’t work for new marketplace competitors why the NFT market remained strong in the depths of a bear market why Pacman thinks AMMs for NFTs won’t work whether the “death of royalties” is good or bad for the ecosystem Hosts Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly  Tarun Chitra, managing partner at Robot Ventures Robert Leshner, founder of Compound  Tom Schmidt, general partner at Dragonfly  Guest Pacman, founder of Blur Twitter Disclosures Previous coverage on NFT royalties: The Chopping Block: Two on Two Debate: NFT Royalty Throwdown! Are NFT Royalties the Way? How to Build a Sustainable Creator Economy Links Dune: Blur VS OpenSea Blog post: How to earn royalties on Blur OpenSea’s response Unchained:  OpenSea Eliminates Marketplace Fee, Makes Creator Royalties Optional Blur Airdrops 360M Tokens to NFT Traders Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices