Blur NFT Marketplace to Shut Down Website as Industry Struggles with Slumping Volumes

Nonfungible token marketplace Blur, which famously once overtook OpenSea to become the largest NFT marketplace by trading volume, has announced that it is shutting down its website next month—a development that has been met with open celebration by some frustrated NFT collectors.

Blur made the surprising announcement on X on Monday, marking its first post on the social media platform in more than a year. According to the announcement, the platform’s frontend will officially shut down on November 12, though its underlying onchain marketplace will remain operational for users who wish to interact with it directly.

At the same time, Blend, the peer-to-peer perpetual NFT lending protocol associated with the ecosystem, will also stop matching new loans. Blur stated that active borrowers have until the November 12 deadline to either repay their outstanding loans or allow them to default. The platform has also promised to provide a dedicated withdrawal interface following the website’s shutdown to ensure users can retrieve their assets.

Despite the technical continuity of the onchain components, the website closure drew sharp rebukes from critics within the digital asset community who blame the platform for altering the economic fabric of the NFT ecosystem.

"Good riddance. You destroyed NFTs. Please shut down and never come back," wrote NFT collector Cryptobscure in a pointed reply to Blur’s announcement on X.

Another collector, known as starfruit, echoed the sentiment in a separate post, writing, "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."

These reactions have renewed intense debate over the aggressive market strategies that helped propel Blur to the top of the NFT trading charts back in 2023. The platform’s meteoric rise was fueled by a combination of optional creator royalties and lucrative token rewards that heavily incentivized professional traders to aggressively bid on and flip digital collectibles.

This disruptive market entry accelerated an industry-wide shift toward lower creator royalties. Following Blur’s momentum, rival marketplace OpenSea later moved to implement optional creator fees for newly launched collections, permanently altering how artists and creators monetize secondary sales.

Blur originally launched on October 19, 2022, introducing a model that allowed sellers to customize their royalty payments while offering larger prospective token rewards to market participants who opted to pay higher creator royalties.

However, Blur entered a digital asset market where royalty protections were already beginning to weaken. Competing marketplace Magic Eden had already moved to optional royalties just the previous week, indicating a broader competitive pressure sweeping across the sector.

The impact on creator earnings was swift and substantial. By July of the following year, blockchain analytics platform Nansen reported that effective creator royalty fees had plummeted to an average of just 0.6% in July 2023, down sharply from an average of 2.5% in 2022. Nansen attributed a significant portion of that steep decline to Blur’s rapid growth, its minimum royalty policy, and the subsequent defensive actions taken by OpenSea, which lowered its own royalty requirements to stay competitive.

NFT sales slump from boom-era highs

Blur did not publicly disclose the specific reasons behind its decision to shutter its website frontend and wind down new lending activity on Blend.

The announcement arrives at a time when overall NFT trading activity remains severely depressed, hovering far below the historic highs witnessed during the sector’s explosive boom era. Market data compiled by CryptoSlam highlights the extent of the contraction, showing that total NFT sales for September reached $167 million across approximately 2.9 million total transactions.

In stark contrast, the market experienced its historic peak in January 2022, when monthly sales volume soared to an astonishing $6 billion across 13.7 million transactions, illustrating a dramatic cooling of retail and institutional interest alike.

The closure of Blur’s website frontend is part of a broader wave of contraction and consolidation across the digital collectibles landscape. Other prominent players have similarly scaled back or exited operations entirely as market conditions tightened. Gemini-owned Nifty Gateway and social collecting platform Rodeo both announced plans to wind down their operations in January, while Foundation announced its marketplace closure in April after a planned corporate sale intended to keep the platform operating ultimately fell through. Major cryptocurrency exchange Binance also completely ended NFT support on its primary exchange platform, shifting asset management functionalities exclusively to Binance Wallet.

Cointelegraph reached out to Blur founder Tieshun “Pacman” Roquerre for additional comment regarding the shutdown and the future outlook of the protocol’s onchain operations.