Blur to Take Its NFT Marketplace Website Offline on November 12

Update 05:02 UTC: The selloff deepened through Tuesday, with CoinGecko showing BLUR at $0.01341, down 29.1% in 24 hours, and trading volume swelling to $42.6 million as market capitalization slipped to roughly $38.75 million.

Frontend Shutdown on November 12

Blur's governing foundation confirmed on Monday, October 12 that the blur.io website will stop operating on November 12, 2026. The team set out the terms in a statement on X, and the opening line draws a clean boundary: the deprecation applies only to the frontend. In a marketplace context, the frontend is everything a visitor touches in the browser, the screens and search functions that let someone browse, list and trade NFTs from the site. Everything beneath that layer survives. The Blur marketplace protocol, the set of smart contracts where trades actually settle, remains operational on-chain after the shutdown date. A position cleared through those contracts is recorded on the chain itself, so it does not vanish with the website. The foundation stated plainly that the measure covers the site alone and does not extend to the blockchain-based trading protocol, which it says keeps running. The post opened a numbered thread, with the frontend deprecation as the first item and the lending service addressed immediately after. The foundation was equally explicit about the token. BLUR will keep control of the protocol's fee switch, the function that determines whether trading fees are charged on transactions and how those fees are routed. That switch is the mechanism through which the token has been tied to marketplace revenue, and the announcement leaves it untouched. For a marketplace that built its name on a fast, professional trading interface, retiring the site while keeping settlement alive is the decisive detail of the notice. From Tuesday, users have one month before the site itself goes dark.

The warning came from outside the project within hours of the notice. Yuga Labs' blockchain vice president Quit posted on X roughly two hours after Blur's announcement, urging holders to revoke their contract approvals on Blur immediately through revoke.cash or similar tools. He said he had inspected Blur's current contracts and found no exploitable flaw, but the contracts are upgradeable, meaning a future update could introduce malicious logic while tens of millions of dollars in NFTs remain authorized to them. He put the exposed approvals at the ten-million-dollar level and noted the team appears to be winding down. Yuga Labs CEO Figge echoed the call, and Quit pointed to the Magic Eden contract exploit last month, which drained millions, as the precedent.

Blur paired its notice with a warning about impostor accounts: in the same thread, the foundation told users to watch out for fake announcements and copied profiles, stating that @blur_io is the only official account. The warning followed trading data showing how far the platform had fallen. According to CoinGecko, BLUR traded near $0.013 as of 10:40 a.m. Taiwan time on October 13, down roughly 33% over 24 hours, putting its market cap at about $36.9 million; the token had peaked near $5 in early 2023. Monthly volume on Blur topped around $1.43 billion in March 2023 but had slipped below $7 million by this March. Founder Tieshun Roquerre (Pacman) also created the Ethereum L2 network Blast, which announced its own closure earlier this month.

The collapse has historical depth, according to CoinGecko's market share research: in February 2023, at the height of its BLUR airdrop campaign, Blur captured 56.8% of NFT trading volume, overtaking OpenSea's 36.5% and rewriting the market's competitive order. The decline since has erased more than 99.5% of that activity, from roughly $1.43 billion in monthly volume in March 2023 to under $7 million by March 2026. A newer CoinGecko snapshot taken after the announcement showed BLUR at about $0.0152, down 20.5% over 24 hours with a circulating market cap near $44.2 million and $14.4 million in daily volume, against an all-time high of $5.02 set in February 2023, a drop of roughly 99.7%. The shutdown also lands amid a broader retreat in the same ecosystem: Abstract, alongside founder Pacman's Blast, has likewise announced it is winding down.

The selloff deepened through Tuesday, with CoinGecko showing BLUR at $0.01341, down 29.1% in 24 hours, and trading volume swelling to $42.6 million as market capitalization slipped to roughly $38.75 million. Derivatives open interest stood near $32.71 million, total value locked at $22.63 million, and the token has lost 77.2% over the past year, with about 2.91 billion of the 3 billion maximum supply circulating. The closure also ends a project with heavyweight backing: Blur emerged in 2022 with an $11 million seed round led by Paradigm, alongside eGirl Capital and 0xMaki, while Blend launched in May 2023 with contributions from Paradigm researchers Dan Robinson and Transmissions11. DappRadar figures cited at the time showed Blend had facilitated about 169,900 ETH in loans, roughly $308 million, within its first 22 days, holding around 82% of NFT borrowing volume.

@blur_io · X post

A statement on X.

View on X

Blend Loans Face a Hard Cutoff

Blend, the lending service Blur built around NFT collateral, is where the change cuts deepest. The service lets a user post an NFT as security and borrow digital assets against it, with a lender on the other side of the position. From November 12, Blend will stop arranging new loan connections altogether. Borrowers carrying an outstanding position face a two-way choice before that date. They can repay the loan in full, or leave it open and let the position convert into a default state. There is no third option described in the notice, and no grace period beyond the cutoff. The default path leaves the lender on the other side in the same unresolved state, because no new loan connections can be arranged after the cutoff. Assets already committed inside the service get a separate treatment. The foundation says it will provide a dedicated web tool that lets users withdraw funds held in Blend after the shutdown. Neither a release schedule nor usage instructions for that tool have been published, so the recovery mechanics stay undefined until the team says more. The foundation also gave no reason for the decision and no account of how it intends to operate the NFT trading protocol from here. That silence covers both the business logic behind pulling the frontend and the longer-term plan for on-chain settlement. What the notice does fix is the sequence: new lending ends on November 12, existing loans must be repaid or left to default, and withdrawals move to a tool that has not yet been detailed. For anyone weighing repay against default, the underlying question is collateral value against the size of the debt, a calculation our Fundamental Analysis of NFTs guide walks through step by step.

The Fee Switch Survives

The structure of the announcement is what matters most: Blur is not switching off its marketplace, only the doorway to it. The contracts stay addressable by anyone who connects to them directly, which is the defining property of Web3 infrastructure, and BLUR holders keep the fee-switch lever that governs revenue. The binding deadline therefore lands on the lending book: new loans stop on November 12, and an unpaid position after that date is a default, not a pause. Markets have already repriced the news, with our live monitoring showing the BLUR spot price down 28.7% over the past 24 hours. Two items remain open and unverifiable until the foundation speaks again: the reason for the shutdown and the release details for the withdrawal tool. Our BLUR technical analysis page tracks where the token trades from here.