Blur Pulls the Plug on Its Website, NFT Vets Hand Out the Goodbye Flowers 🌹

Blur will permanently shut down its website frontend on November 12, the NFT marketplace said in an X post on October 12, its first update on the platform in more than a year. The closure applies only to the blur.io interface; the onchain marketplace protocol will remain operational, and $BLUR holders will continue to control the protocol's fee switch. Blend, Blur's peer-to-peer perpetual NFT lending protocol, will stop matching new loans on the same date. Borrowers have until November 12 to repay outstanding loans or allow them to default, and Blur said it would provide a withdrawal tool afterward.

The $BLUR token fell as much as 29% on the news, sliding to around $0.015 from a peak above $5 in early 2023. The shutdown comes as NFT trading sits at a small slice of its boom-era peaks. Data from CryptoSlam shows total NFT sales of $167 million across 2.9 million transactions in September, compared with $6 billion across 13.7 million transactions in January 2022. Global NFT market revenue is projected at $318.3 million in 2026, essentially flat on the prior year, according to Statista. Monthly NFT sales volume fell to $167.2 million in September from $554.8 million a year earlier and $1.78 billion in December 2023.

Some collectors used the announcement to settle scores. "Good riddance. You destroyed NFTs. Please shut down and never come back," wrote NFT collector Cryptobscure in an X reply. "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," NFT collector starfruit posted. Critics have long pointed to Blur's launch strategy of optional creator royalties and token rewards that rewarded traders for bidding and flipping, alongside rival marketplace Magic Eden having moved to optional royalties the week before Blur launched. Effective creator royalty fees fell to 0.6% in July 2023 from an average of 2.5% in 2022, blockchain analytics platform Nansen reported, attributing much of the drop to Blur's growth and its minimum royalty policy, as well as OpenSea lowering its own royalty requirements to compete.

Blur did not disclose why it decided to shutter its frontend and end new Blend lending. The marketplace launched on Oct. 19, 2022, allowing sellers to customize royalty payments while offering larger prospective token rewards to those who paid higher creator royalties. The closure follows the earlier wind-down of Blast, the Ethereum layer-2 network launched in November 2023 by the team behind Blur. Blast said earlier this month that maintaining the network now costs more than it earns and that it sees no credible path to making the chain economically sustainable; the mainnet layer drew more than $2.3 billion in deposits by its February 2024 launch, and have given users until October 26 to withdraw through its interface. Other NFT platforms have exited the industry this year as well, including Gemini-owned Nifty Gateway and social collecting platform Rodeo, which announced wind-down plans in January, Foundation, which announced 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.

Cointelegraph reached out to Blur founder Tieshun "Pacman" Roquerre for comment.