Blur Shuts Down Its Website on November 12 After NFT Volumes Collapse 99.5%

Published October 13, 2026, 4:15 PM PKT. Based on Blur's official announcement on X (Oct. 13, 2026), plus reporting by CoinDesk and Cointelegraph.

Blur, once the largest marketplace for trading Ethereum NFTs, said on Monday that its website will shut down on November 12, capping one of the steepest collapses of the NFT era. The announcement came in the marketplace's first post on X in more than a year, and CoinDesk reported that the BLUR token fell more than 20% on the news.

The November 12 shutdown

The frontend at blur.io will go dark on November 12, according to the company's announcement. The same date is the deadline for Blend, Blur's peer-to-peer perpetual NFT lending protocol, which will stop matching new loans. Borrowers have until November 12 to repay outstanding loans or allow them to go into default, surrendering their NFT collateral, and the company said it will provide a separate withdrawal interface after the shutdown so users can still access their assets.

The shutdown applies only to the website, not to the underlying smart contracts on Ethereum, the company stressed. The onchain marketplace will keep running, meaning technically skilled users could still interact with the trading system directly, though nearly all activity flowed through the website. BLUR tokenholders will retain control of the fee switch, a governance mechanism that lets them vote on whether the marketplace should start charging trading fees.

Blur offered no explanation for the timing of the decision in its post.

From $1.43 billion to under $7 million

Blur launched on October 19, 2022 and challenged the-then market leader OpenSea by offering professional traders faster transactions, low fees and token rewards. The strategy worked fast: in March 2023, Blur captured more than 70% of Ethereum NFT trading volume, with activity on the platform reaching approximately $1.43 billion, according to DefiLlama data cited by CoinDesk.

By March 2026, that monthly volume had fallen below $7 million, a decline of more than 99.5%. CoinDesk reported that the fee-free marketplace recorded no protocol revenue over the past three years.

Roquerre's second retreat in ten days

The closure is the second major retreat in ten days for projects built by crypto entrepreneur Tieshun Roquerre, better known as Pacman. On October 2, developers behind Blast, an Ethereum scaling network also created by Roquerre and built by the team behind Blur, announced they were shutting it down.

Blast once attracted more than $2 billion in assets, partly through rewards offered to users depositing funds. That figure had fallen to approximately $32 million when developers announced the closure, saying the network cost more to operate than it generated in revenue, CoinDesk reported.

How Blur took the crown, and why collectors cheered its fall

Blur's rise was closely tied to the optional creator royalties strategy that let sellers customize royalty payments while offering larger token rewards to those who paid higher ones. The approach accelerated an industry-wide shift toward lower creator royalties, with rival OpenSea later moving to optional creator fees for new collections.

Blockchain analytics platform Nansen reported that effective creator royalty fees fell to 0.6% in July 2023, down from an average of 2.5% in 2022, attributing much of the gap to Blur's growth and OpenSea lowering its own royalty requirements to compete, Cointelegraph reported. Blur entered a market where royalty protections were already weakening: competing marketplace Magic Eden had moved to optional royalties the week before Blur's October 2022 launch.

Some NFT collectors could not hide their satisfaction. "Good riddance. You destroyed NFTs. Please shut down and never come back," collector Cryptobscure replied to the announcement on X, according to Cointelegraph. Another collector, starfruit, wrote: "Congratulations to us for surviving you."

This article is news reporting and is not investment advice.

Sources

• Blur, official announcement on X (Oct. 13, 2026), primary source for the November 12 shutdown date, the Blend loan halt and the withdrawal interface promise, and for the onchain marketplace remaining operational
• CoinDesk, Once-largest Ethereum NFT marketplace Blur is shutting down after volumes collapse 99% (Oct. 13, 2026), secondary source for the BLUR token drop, the DefiLlama volume figures ($1.43 billion in March 2023 to under $7 million in March 2026), the zero protocol revenue figure, the Blast shutdown context, and the fee-switch governance detail
• Cointelegraph, Why NFT Collectors Are Cheering Blur's Website Shutdown (Oct. 13, 2026), secondary source for the collector reactions, the optional-royalty strategy history, the Nansen royalty figures (0.6% in July 2023 vs 2.5% in 2022), the October 19, 2022 launch date, and Magic Eden's move the week before