Once the largest Ethereum NFT marketplace around, Blur said this week that it will shut off its frontend in November, concluding its run as recent trading volume sat at a fraction of its previous peaks.
Key Takeaways
- Ethereum NFT marketplace Blur will shut down its website on Nov. 12, 2026.
- Blur’s lending protocol Blend will also stop facilitating loans on the same date.
- The NFT market has cooled dramatically in the last few years, and trading volume on the marketplace has collapsed since its early 2023 peak.
Blur’s Impending Demise Follows Domination
Blur’s “frontend will be deprecated on Nov. 12, 2026,” according to a Monday post on X, meaning that the marketplace website will no longer be available for traders. The underlying trading protocol will continue to function and can be accessed via smart contract interactions and aggregators, but the branded Blur marketplace will cease to exist this time next month.
Furthermore, Blur’s NFT-backed lending protocol, Blend, will stop facilitating loans on the same date, per an X post. “Borrowers have until then to repay their loans or allow them to default,” it reads. “After this date, we will provide a frontend tool to help users withdraw their assets from Blend.”
Blur launched in late 2022 after the NFT bull market of 2021 and early 2022 was already losing steam, but it shook up the space early the following year by overtaking the dominant rival marketplace, Opensea. That move was fueled in large part by offering traders a share of a BLUR token airdrop, prompting billions of dollars’ worth of Ethereum NFT trades.
However, Blur’s rise was controversial among NFT enthusiasts. While the airdrop amounted to a giveaway of free crypto cash for users, some collectors believed the resulting avalanche of rapid trading devalued the non-fungible assets, with some analysts labeling the trading volume as “wash trading.”
Blur defended its model to Decrypt in 2023, saying the volume surge was “misunderstood” by some analysts. But as NFT prices broadly continued to sink, the platform continued to take heat from pockets of the industry. Early momentum on Blur cooled significantly as the appeal of token incentives faded with the falling price of BLUR, however.
Over the last year, data from Token Terminal shows Opensea back on top with $557 million worth of NFT trading volume, compared to $235 million for Blur. Per the same data resource, Blur’s trading volume across all of September tallied $19.15 million, compared to a peak month of nearly $1.43 billion back in March 2023.
While Blur’s relevance as a prominent NFT marketplace has faded in recent years, some of the hard feelings still linger among collectors. “Good riddance. You destroyed NFTs. Please shut down and never come back,” one X user replied to the post. Another suggested that Blur’s exit would be the “bottom signal for NFTs.”
Earlier this month, Blur founder Tieshun “Pacman” Roquerre announced that Blast—an Ethereum Layer 2 network launched in 2024—would also shut down, with plans to take the network offline on October 26. Another Layer 2 network, Abstract, is set to close down in December.
Blur isn’t the only marketplace to shut down in 2026 as NFT demand remains diminished. Once-prominent platforms Nifty Gateway and Foundation both shuttered this year, while former top marketplace Magic Eden significantly scaled back support amid a pivot towards gambling.
The price of BLUR fell to a new low on Tuesday, crashing 35% in the last 24 hours to $0.0115—down 99.8% from its all-time high above $5.00.