NFT Marketplace Blur to Shut Down Website, Stop New Blend Loans Next Month

Ethereum NFT marketplace Blur will shut down its website on November 12, the company said.

The deprecation applies only to the blur.io frontend. The Blur marketplace protocol will remain operational on-chain, and holders of the BLUR token will continue to control its fee switch, the team said.

Blend, Blur’s peer-to-peer NFT lending platform, will stop matching new loans on the same date. Borrowers have until then to repay their loans or allow them to default, and Blur said it will provide a tool afterward to help users withdraw their assets from Blend.

Blur and the NFT market

Blur launched in 2022 with a token airdrop to traders, and quickly overtook OpenSea in trading volume. Critics later questioned whether its incentives helped crash NFT prices.

The NFT market has since shrunk sharply. Global NFT market revenue is projected at $318.3 million in 2026, essentially flat on last year, according to Statista, well below its peaks in 2021 and 2022.

Monthly NFT sales volume fell to $167.2 million in September, down from $554.8 million a year earlier and $1.78 billion in December 2023, according to data from CryptoSlam. That is a fraction of the multibillion-dollar months recorded at the market’s peak in 2021 and 2022.

Cheaper NFTs have driven up sales counts even as trading volume has plummeted, according to DappRadar.

The move comes after Blast, the Ethereum layer-2 network launched in November 2023 by the team behind Blur, said earlier this month that it is shutting down because it costs more to run than it earns. Blast drew more than $2.3 billion in deposits by its February 2024 mainnet launch, and has given users until October 26 to withdraw through its interface.