Blur, the marketplace that knocked OpenSea off its perch in 2022, is turning off its website. The blur.io frontend goes dark on Nov. 12, the company said.
Monthly NFT sales volume was $167.2 million in September. In December 2023, the same figure was $1.78 billion. Blur’s exit follows that decline.
The website closes, but the protocol stays
The company was careful about what’s shutting down. Only the website is going away. The Blur marketplace protocol will remain operational on-chain, and BLUR token holders will continue to control its fee switch, the team said.
“This deprecation only applies to the frontend,” Blur said in a post on X.
That matters less than it sounds. A protocol that keeps running on-chain still works for anyone who can reach it without the official site. Most people trading NFTs use the website, though, and that’s the part being removed.
Blend borrowers have four weeks
Blend, Blur’s peer-to-peer NFT lending platform, will stop matching new loans on the same day. If you have an open loan, you have until Nov. 12 to repay it or let it default.
Blur said it will provide a tool after that date to help users withdraw their assets from Blend. The company hasn’t said what the tool will look like or exactly when it will arrive. If you have NFTs locked in Blend, don’t count on that tool. Settle your position before the deadline.
Blast shut down first
The Blur team has done this before, and recently. Earlier this month, Blast, the Ethereum layer-2 network the same team launched in November 2023, said it’s shutting down because it costs more to run than it earns.
Blast pulled in more than $2.3 billion in deposits by its February 2024 mainnet launch. Users have until Oct. 26 to withdraw through its interface. That gave Blast users about two weeks of notice. Blend borrowers get about a month.
A market a fraction of its 2021 size
Blur launched in 2022 with a token airdrop to traders and quickly passed OpenSea in trading volume. Critics later questioned whether its incentives helped crash NFT prices. It’s hard to separate that question from the shutdown.
September’s $167.2 million in sales was down from $554.8 million a year earlier, according to industry sales data. The market’s peak months in 2021 and 2022 brought in billions. Global NFT market revenue is projected at $318.3 million in 2026, essentially flat on last year, according to market research projections. That’s well below the 2021 and 2022 peaks.
Sales counts have gone up even as trading volume plummeted, because NFTs have gotten cheaper. There are more trades, and each one is worth less. A marketplace built on volume-based rewards can’t make that work for long.
If you still hold NFTs on Blur or have a loan open on Blend, put Nov. 12 on your calendar this week.
