Blur Plunges 7% After Machi Big Brother Transfers All His Tokens to Binance

A wallet belonging to Jeffrey "Machi Big Brother" Huang moved all its BLUR, roughly $3.1 million, over to centralized crypto exchange Binance early this morning, according to onchain data.

Earlier this morning—amid the apparent selling on Binance—BLUR dropped as low as $0.1596. It's since recovered slightly; at the time of writing, BLUR is trading for $0.1621, down 7.2% on the day, per 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 it's since seen activity on its platform take a big dive. The NFT marketplace has also become a controversial player in the NFT space, drawing fire for a model that critics say incentivizes traders to flip their NFTs.

Huang isn't one of the Blur founders or executives, but he has been one of the largest lenders on the platform. He did not immediately responded to a request for comment from Decrypt.

Huang's wallet movements were flagged on SpotonChain and appear to match up with the entity profile that blockchain analytics platform Arkham Intelligence has compiled for Machi. But the transfers probably weren't a complete surprise for the NFT platform's community.

Just last week, Huang was chatting on the Blur DAO Discord server about growing unrest over the token's falling price as users questioned its value. In the past month alone, BLUR has fallen 52% from $0.34, according to CoinGecko data.

In one message, Huang appeared to be looking for clarification on how the BLUR airdrop had been divvied up among farmers, holders, and how much had been reserved for governance.

In a response to his message, another community member advised him to sell his BLUR tokens to buy BLAST tokens instead.

"Makes complete sense at this moment $blur is higher mc than $blast," they added. Huang's response: "I thought about it."

Blast is an Ethereum layer-2 network launched by Blur founder Tieshun Roquerre, who goes by Pacman online. The main draw of Blast is that it offers "native yield for Ethereum and stablecoins,” letting users stake (or lock up) their funds in the network to earn an interest-like return.

The two projects aren't related, other than sharing a founder. But Blur users have complained that the NFT marketplace and its tokenholders have seemed at times to be an afterthought.

A few hours later, on the Blur Discord server, Huang sent a message saying he was having trouble withdrawing his staked BLUR tokens. He came back 20 minutes later to say that a link shared by a moderator had worked. That was the latest message he sent on the server on July 5.