Blur to Shut Down Its NFT Marketplace Website on Nov. 12

Blur, which at its peak handled more than 70% of Ethereum NFT trading volume, will deprecate its marketplace frontend on Nov. 12, 2026, the company said in an announcement on X on Monday, according to Coincentral. Monthly volume fell from roughly $1.43 billion in March 2023 to under $7 million in March 2026, a drop of more than 99%.

The closure applies to the website only. Blur said its marketplace protocol will keep running on-chain and that $BLUR will continue to control its fee switch, the mechanism tokenholders use to vote on whether the marketplace charges trading fees. Blur’s website still advertises zero marketplace fees and more than $7.4 billion in lifetime trading volume.

Key facts

• The Blur frontend will be deprecated on Nov. 12, 2026, while the marketplace protocol stays operational on-chain and $BLUR retains control of the fee switch.
• Blend, Blur’s NFT lending service, will stop matching new loans on Nov. 12; borrowers must repay or default by then, and Blur says a tool for withdrawing assets from Blend will follow after the deadline.
• Blur’s monthly trading volume fell from about $1.43 billion in March 2023 to under $7 million in March 2026, a decline of more than 99.5%, according to DefiLlama.
• The BLUR token dropped more than 20% to near $0.015 after the announcement, giving it a market value of about $44 million; it traded above $5 in early 2023.
• Blur’s move comes ten days after Blast, the Ethereum scaling network founded by Tieshun “Pacman” Roquerre, announced it would wind down.

The protocol outlives the website

Blur’s smart contracts will continue running on Ethereum after the frontend goes dark. Token Terminal data cited by Coincentral shows $0 in protocol revenue over the past three years, though the same data does not indicate whether the company earned money from lending or other business lines.

Blur did not say why it made the decision, and Cointelegraph reported that it reached out to founder Tieshun “Pacman” Roquerre for comment. Blur’s X post was its first on the platform in more than a year, Cointelegraph noted.

The timing follows a wider contraction across NFT infrastructure. Cointelegraph reported that Gemini-owned Nifty Gateway and the social collecting platform Rodeo announced shutdown plans in January, Foundation announced its closure in April after a sale intended to keep it operating fell through, and Binance ended NFT support on its exchange, moving asset management to Binance Wallet.

Collectors welcome a shutdown Blur never sold as one

Reaction to the news was not uniformly mournful. Cointelegraph reported that NFT collectors cheered the closure, with one collector replying to Blur’s post that the platform “destroyed NFTs” and asking it to shut down and never come back, while another congratulated the community for “surviving” Blur.

That anger traces back to the strategy that lifted Blur to the top of the NFT rankings in 2023. Cointelegraph reported that Blur launched on Oct. 19, 2022, letting sellers customize royalty payments while offering larger prospective token rewards to those who paid higher creator royalties. Rival Magic Eden had moved to optional royalties the previous week, and within roughly nine months Nansen data showed effective creator royalty fees had fallen to 0.6% in July 2023 from an average of 2.5% in 2022, a gap the analytics firm attributed largely to Blur’s growth, its minimum royalty policy, and OpenSea lowering its own royalty requirements in response.

Critics also said Blur’s reward programs encouraged airdrop farming and suspected wash trading, and that its royalty stance hurt creators including Yuga Labs, the company behind Bored Ape Yacht Club.

Unlike Blast, Blur has not blamed its shutdown on operating losses. Blast, which once held more than $2 billion in assets and fell to about $32 million before the closure was announced, was described by its developers as costing more to run than it earned. Abstract, an Ethereum layer 2 backed by Pudgy Penguins, has also announced a shutdown.

Why it matters

The frontend shutdown ends the product that reshaped how NFT marketplaces set creator royalties, but it does not erase Blur from Ethereum, and tokenholders keep a governance lever over trading fees. For traders with open Blend positions, the near-term risk is mechanical rather than sentimental: positions must be repaid or allowed to default before the deadline. Blur’s decline also sits inside a broader NFT slump, with Cointelegraph reporting September total NFT sales of $167 million across 2.9 million transactions against a January 2022 peak of $6 billion over 13.7 million transactions.

What to watch

The Nov. 12 deadline is the pivotal date, covering both the frontend deprecation and the end of new loan matching on Blend. Blast users face an earlier cutoff, with until Oct. 26 to withdraw funds through that network’s regular interface. How BLUR tokenholders use the fee switch after the website goes dark is the next question the protocol itself will answer.

Disclaimer: This article is for information only and is not investment, financial or trading advice. Cryptocurrency prices are highly volatile. Always do your own research.

Sources: CoinCentral, Cointelegraph