Blur pulls the plug on Nov 12, and the NFT crowd hands out a one-star review 🪦

NFT marketplace Blur will shut down its blur.io website on Nov. 12, the project announced on X on Monday in its first post on the platform in more than a year, while its on-chain marketplace protocol remains operational. The shutdown notice was paired with bad market news for the project's native token: $BLUR dropped as much as 29% on the news, sliding to roughly $0.015 from an early-2023 peak above $5.

Alongside the frontend closure, 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 a withdrawal interface will be made available after the shutdown.

The reaction from longtime NFT collectors was unforgiving. "Good riddance. You destroyed NFTs. Please shut down and never come back," collector Cryptobscure wrote in reply to Blur's post on X. Another collector, starfruit, added: "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."

The backlash revived criticism of the tactics that propelled Blur to the top of the NFT volume charts in 2023, including optional creator royalties and token rewards that incentivized traders to flip NFTs. Blur launched on Oct. 19, 2022, letting sellers customize royalty payments while offering larger prospective token rewards to those who paid higher creator royalties. By July 2023, blockchain analytics platform Nansen reported effective creator royalty fees had fallen to 0.6% from an average of 2.5% in 2022, attributing much of that drop to Blur's growth, its minimum royalty policy and rival OpenSea lowering its own royalty requirements to compete.

Blur did not disclose why it decided to shutter the frontend and wind down new lending activity. The move comes as NFT trading remains far below boom-era levels: CryptoSlam data shows total NFT sales in September were $167 million across 2.9 million transactions, compared with a January 2022 peak of $6 billion over 13.7 million transactions. Several NFT-focused platforms have already exited in 2026, including Gemini-owned Nifty Gateway and social collecting platform Rodeo, which announced wind-downs in January, Foundation, which announced its closure in April after a planned sale fell through, and Binance, which ended NFT support on its exchange and shifted asset management to Binance Wallet.