Blur is pulling the plug on its website. The marketplace, which overtook OpenSea in 2022, said the blur.io frontend will go offline on Nov. 12.
The move comes after a steep slide in NFT sales. Monthly volume reached $1.78 billion in December 2023, but by September it had fallen to $167.2 million.
The protocol survives the website
Blur was specific about what is going away, and it is only the website. According to the team, the Blur marketplace protocol will keep running on-chain, and BLUR token holders will still control its fee switch.
“This deprecation only applies to the frontend,” Blur said in a post on X.
In practice, that distinction counts for less than it might seem. Anyone who can reach the on-chain protocol without the official site can still use it. But most NFT traders go through the website, and that is exactly what is disappearing.
Four weeks for Blend borrowers
Blend, Blur’s peer-to-peer NFT lending platform, will also stop matching new loans on that same day. Anyone with an open loan has until Nov. 12 to either repay it or let it default.
After that date, Blur said it will offer a tool to help users withdraw their assets from Blend. It has not explained how the tool will work or given a firm release date. If you have NFTs locked in Blend, don’t rely on it. Close out your position before the deadline.
Blast went first
This isn’t the first shutdown from the Blur team, or even the first this month. Earlier in October, Blast, the Ethereum layer-2 network the same team launched in November 2023, said it is closing because it costs more to run than it brings in.
By the time its mainnet went live in February 2024, Blast had attracted more than $2.3 billion in deposits. Users can withdraw through its interface until Oct. 26, which gave them roughly two weeks of notice. Blend borrowers get about a month.
A market a fraction of its 2021 size
Blur debuted in 2022 with a token airdrop for traders and soon passed OpenSea in trading volume. Critics later asked whether its incentives played a part in crashing NFT prices, and that question is hard to separate from the shutdown.
Industry sales data puts September’s sales at $167.2 million, down from $554.8 million in the same month a year earlier. At the market’s 2021 and 2022 peak, monthly totals ran into the billions. Market research projections put global NFT market revenue at $318.3 million in 2026, roughly flat from last year and well below those 2021 and 2022 highs.
The number of sales has actually gone up while trading volume collapsed, because NFTs have become cheaper. People are making more trades, but each one is worth less. A marketplace that pays rewards based on volume can’t keep that going for long.
If you still have NFTs on Blur or an open loan on Blend, mark Nov. 12 on your calendar this week.