Blur, once one of the industry’s largest NFT marketplaces, announced that its website will shut down on November 12, and that its NFT lending service, Blend, will stop matching new loans. As trading activity in the NFT market has cooled sharply, Blur’s monthly trading volume has fallen by more than 99.5% from its 2023 peak. This is the second major exit announcement in just 10 days involving a project under crypto entrepreneur Pacman.
Blur halts new lending, while smart contracts remain on Ethereum
Blur announced Monday that its website will shut down on November 12, and its NFT lending platform, Blend, will stop arranging new loans. Existing borrowers must repay their loans by the deadline or face default. After the website closes, Blur plans to provide a separate tool allowing users to withdraw assets from Blend.
However, Blur shutting down its website does not mean its underlying trading system will cease operating entirely. The relevant smart contracts will remain active on Ethereum, and BLUR token holders will retain control of the fee switch, allowing them to vote on whether the marketplace should begin charging trading fees.
Blur has not publicly said that the shutdown is due to operating losses. Its website still lists marketplace trading fees as zero and cumulative trading volume at more than $7.4 billion, but the platform has not generated protocol revenue from trading fees over the long term.
Monthly trading volume falls from $1.4 billion to less than $7 million
Launched in 2022, Blur challenged OpenSea, then the leading NFT marketplace, with a faster trading experience, low fees, and token rewards, quickly attracting professional traders.
According to DeFiLlama data, Blur’s monthly trading volume reached around $1.43 billion in March 2023, at one point accounting for more than 70% of Ethereum NFT trading volume. However, as interest in the NFT market waned, trading volume on the platform also shrank sharply, falling to less than $7 million by March 2026—a drop of more than 99.5% from its peak.
Blur previously used rewards aggressively to attract traders, but this strategy also drew criticism for potentially encouraging speculative trading and putting pressure on NFT creators’ royalty income. However, trading volume data alone cannot show how much activity came from genuine buying and selling demand versus trades made to earn rewards.
Additionally, Token Terminal data shows that Blur generated no protocol revenue over the past three years, indicating that its marketplace did not earn revenue from protocol trading fees. However, this data cannot directly establish whether the platform ever profited from Blend’s lending service or other business activities.
Projects founded by the same founder shut down one after another
Blur announced that it was shutting down its website just about 10 days after Blast, an Ethereum scaling network also founded by Roquerre, announced that it would cease operations.
Blast once attracted more than $2 billion in assets, partly because the platform offered rewards to users who deposited funds. However, according to an earlier announcement, Blast’s assets have fallen to around $32 million, and the development team noted that the network’s operating costs had exceeded the revenue it generated.
By contrast, Blur has not publicly attributed its shutdown decision to operating losses. The successive contraction of the two businesses highlights the challenges that business models relying on token rewards to attract users and trading activity may face when market enthusiasm fades.
After the announcement, the BLUR token fell by more than 20%, to around $0.015. Blast users must withdraw their assets through the network’s standard interface by October 26. Blur is expected to shut down its website on November 12, and will provide a separate tool for withdrawing Blend assets at a later date.
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