Blur to shut its NFT marketplace website on November 12

Blur, once the busiest NFT marketplace on Ethereum, said it will shut down its website on November 12. Its Blend lending service closes the same day. The move follows a collapse in trading that left monthly volume below $7 million.

The announcement came in a post on Blur's official account on X on Monday, October 12, 2026. Both CoinDesk and The Block reported it, each linking the same post. Blur called the change a frontend shutdown, not an end to the protocol itself.

What is closing, and what stays

Blur.io, the website people used to browse and buy NFTs, goes offline on November 12. Blend, the tool that let holders borrow against their NFTs, stops matching new loans that day. It was one of several on-chain lending services, like these Bitcoin-backed loans, that let people raise cash without selling. Borrowers have until November 12 to repay or let their loans default, and Blur said it will add a separate tool afterward so users can pull assets out of Blend.

Underneath, the code keeps running. Blur's smart contracts stay live on Ethereum, and holders of BLUR, the marketplace's token, keep control of the fee switch, the setting that decides whether the marketplace ever charges trading fees. Nothing is frozen. Closing the website does not kill Blur. The contracts stay live, so in a narrow technical sense the marketplace still exists, even if almost no one is using it.

How Blur went from the top to near zero

Blur's fall was steep. Monthly trading volume peaked near $1.43 billion in March 2023, according to DefiLlama figures cited by both CoinDesk and The Block. At that point Blur handled more than 70 percent of all Ethereum NFT trading. Three years later, in March 2026, monthly volume had dropped below $7 million. That is a fall of more than 99.5 percent.

The two figures tell the story. A business that moved $1.43 billion a month now moves less than $7 million, the kind of drop that usually means a product has run its course. Blur's leaders seem to agree.

None of this is a mystery. Blur rose fast in early 2023, overtaking OpenSea by paying active traders in BLUR tokens. NFT trading then cooled across the whole market after the 2021 and 2022 boom, and newer venues copied the same token-reward playbook to pull volume away. When Blur's rewards thinned, so did its trading. Token Terminal lists zero protocol revenue for Blur over the past three years, though CoinDesk noted that figure does not capture whether lending or other activity made money. Barely a trace left.

A token sell-off, and a wider shakeout

BLUR itself fell hard on the news. It changed hands near $0.013 on the morning of October 13, 2026 UTC, down about 30 percent over the prior 24 hours, according to CoinGecko. The token traded above $5 in early 2023. Its market value now sits under $40 million, a fall of more than 99 percent from that peak.

What BLUR holders are left with is narrow. They can still vote on the fee switch, which decides whether the surviving contracts ever charge a cut of trades. With the website gone and trades close to nil, that power may not be worth much. It is governance over a market that has mostly stopped happening.

Roquerre has a hand in more than one of these closures. Tieshun Roquerre, the founder known as Pacman who started Blur, also built the Blast network, which announced its own shutdown on October 2. Blast users have until October 26 to withdraw through its normal interface. When he doxxed himself in early 2023, Roquerre had pitched Blur as the "Binance of NFTs." Separately, the Pudgy Penguins-backed Ethereum layer-2 Abstract said on October 6 that it would close too. Three projects from the last NFT cycle have now set closing dates within about two weeks of each other. Blur's wind-down is part of a wider shakeout among DeFi protocols from the last cycle that never found steady users.

What to watch

Blur has not said what, if anything, will replace the website beyond a Blend withdrawal tool, and it has not said when that tool arrives. Two things are worth tracking. First, whether BLUR holders ever use the fee switch they still control. Second, what happens to users who still have NFTs or loans tied up in the protocol. The one hard date that matters is November 12, when Blend loans must be repaid or left to default. Nothing has been said about Roquerre's next project.