Blur bids the blur.io frontend adieu Nov. 12 — collectors don't shed a single NFT tear 🪦

Ethereum NFT marketplace Blur will shut down its blur.io website on Nov. 12, the project said in an X post on Oct. 12, its first post on the platform in more than a year. The Blur on-chain marketplace protocol will remain operational, and the $BLUR token will continue to control its fee switch. Blend, Blur's peer-to-peer perpetual NFT lending protocol, will stop matching new loans on the same date; borrowers have until Nov. 12 to repay outstanding loans or allow them to default, and Blur said it will provide a withdrawal interface afterward. Cointelegraph reached out to Blur founder Tieshun "Pacman" Roquerre for comment.

The $BLUR token fell as much as 29% on the news, sliding to around $0.015 from a peak above $5 in 2023. Some collectors reacted to the announcement with relief rather than regret. "Good riddance. You destroyed NFTs. Please shut down and never come back," NFT collector Cryptobscure wrote in reply to the post on X. "You may not have been able to complete your mission to destroy NFTs. But you acted with extreme determination and tried everything. Congratulations to us for surviving you," collector starfruit said in another post. The criticism revived a long-running debate over Blur's optional creator royalties and token rewards, which rewarded traders for bidding and flipping NFTs. Blur launched on Oct. 19, 2022, allowing sellers to customize royalty payments while offering larger prospective token rewards to those who paid higher creator royalties; competing marketplace Magic Eden had moved to optional royalties the previous week. By July 2023, blockchain analytics platform Nansen reported that effective creator royalty fees had fallen to 0.6% from an average of 2.5% in 2022, attributing much of that gap to Blur's growth and OpenSea lowering its own royalty requirements to compete.

The frontend wind-down comes as NFT trading sits a fraction of its boom-era highs. CryptoSlam data shows total NFT sales of $167 million over 2.9 million transactions in September, compared with a January 2022 peak of $6 billion in sales over 13.7 million transactions. Blur's monthly trading volume has dropped more than 99.5% from its 2023 peak, when the marketplace captured more than 70% of Ethereum-based NFT volume and overtook OpenSea; the protocol has not publicly attributed the closure to operating losses.

The shutdown follows a series of contractions across the NFT and Ethereum scaling space. Gemini-owned Nifty Gateway and social collecting platform Rodeo announced plans to wind down 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, shifting asset management to Binance Wallet. Blast, the Ethereum layer-2 network launched in November 2023 by the team behind Blur, said on Oct. 2 that maintaining the network costs more than it earns and that it sees no credible path to making the chain economically sustainable; users have until Oct. 26 to withdraw through its interface, after which Blast drew more than $2.3 billion in deposits by its February 2024 mainnet launch.