Blur shuts its NFT marketplace on 12 November as NFT exits pile up

The Blur NFT marketplace is shutting down its blur.io website on 12 November 2026. At its peak in 2023, Blur handled more than 70% of Ethereum NFT trading. Its Blend lending service will stop matching new loans the same day, the company said in an X thread on 12 October. The smart contracts stay live on Ethereum. Blur gave no reason for the decision, and BLUR, its token, fell to a record low in the following days.

Blur is the fourth NFT-linked exit in under two weeks. Porsche ended its 911 NFT club on 1 October. Blast, the layer 2 network built by the team behind Blur, said on 2 October it would wind down, and Abstract, the chain run by Pudgy Penguins owner Igloo, followed on 6 October. Each comes with its own deadline: 26 October for Blast withdrawals through the usual interface, 12 November for Blur and Blend, 15 December for Abstract.

The backdrop is a market that has kept shrinking. NFT sales came to $167.2 million in September 2026, according to CryptoSlam data reported by Decrypt, against $554.8 million a year earlier. That is a fall of 70%.

Blur NFT marketplace shutting down: the website goes, the contracts stay

What closes on 12 November is the frontend, the website most traders used to list, bid and buy. Blur was explicit on this point: “This deprecation only applies to the frontend.” The marketplace protocol, the set of smart contracts that settles trades on Ethereum, keeps running, and BLUR holders keep control of the fee switch, a governance lever that would let them vote to turn on trading fees.

The difference matters for anyone holding an NFT bought on Blur. The token lives in the owner’s wallet on Ethereum, not on Blur, so nothing is lost when the site goes dark. What disappears is the easy way to trade against Blur’s order book and its bidding pools. Blur has not named any other website that will host an interface for its contracts, and no replacement had been announced by Friday morning.

The thread was Blur’s first post on X in more than a year, Cointelegraph noted. It closed with a warning about impersonators and fake announcements: @blur_io is the only official account. Unlike Blast, Blur did not cite operating losses, CoinDesk reported. It has also not said whether the team or the company behind it carries on.

Blend borrowers have until 12 November to repay

Blend is Blur’s peer-to-peer lending market, where people borrow against NFTs used as collateral. If a borrower does not repay, the lender can take the NFT. On the shutdown, Blur was direct: “Blend will stop matching new loans on November 12, 2026”.

In practice, borrowers with an open Blend loan must repay it before that date or let it default and lose the collateral. Blur said it will then provide a frontend tool to withdraw assets from Blend, The Block reported. No date has been given for that tool. Nor has Blur published how much is still lent out on Blend; we found no figure for outstanding loans.

Lenders face the mirror question. A lender whose loan defaults is owed the NFT, but the tool Blur promised for pulling assets out of Blend after 12 November has not been released or dated. Until it is, the blur.io website remains the only interface Blur has offered for Blend positions.

From 70% of Ethereum NFT volume to under $7 million a month

Blur launched on 19 October 2022 with zero trading fees, optional creator royalties and token rewards for traders who listed and bid. Days earlier, Magic Eden, then the largest Solana NFT marketplace, had announced that it would make royalties optional, Decrypt reported on 16 October 2022. Founder Tieshun Roquerre, known as “Pacman”, spoke in early 2023 of building a “Binance of NFTs”, The Block recalled.

In March 2023 Blur handled about $1.43 billion of trades in a month and more than 70% of Ethereum NFT volume, according to DefiLlama data cited by CoinDesk and The Block’s own figures. By March 2026 its monthly volume was below $7 million, a drop of more than 99.5%. The blur.io home page still displayed “$7.4B Total GMV” and “0% marketplace fees” when we checked it on 16 October.

Creators paid part of the bill. Nansen found that effective royalties fell from an average of 2.5% in 2022 to 0.6% by July 2023, and blamed much of the decline on Blur’s growth, its minimum-royalty policy and OpenSea loosening its own rules, Cointelegraph reported. Token Terminal records $0 of protocol revenue for Blur over the past three years, though CoinDesk points out that this says nothing about lending or other income.

Many collectors did not mourn. “Good riddance. You destroyed NFTs,” one collector, Cryptobscure, wrote on X, as quoted by Cointelegraph.

BLUR token falls to a record low near one cent

BLUR fell more than 20% to about $0.015 after the announcement on 12 October, a market value of about $44 million, The Block and CoinDesk reported. The slide continued on Tuesday 13 October: CoinMarketCap Academy put the token near $0.0117, down 35% in 24 hours, with an all-time low near $0.0115.

BLUR traded at $0.01065 at about 08:05 UTC on 16 October, according to CoinGecko, up 4.3% over 24 hours but down 44.6% over seven days. That puts its market value near $30.9 million. CoinGecko records the all-time low at $0.009945. The token peaked above $5 in February 2023, around its airdrop, so it has lost more than 99% of its value since. About 2.91 billion of a maximum 3 billion tokens are in circulation.

What the token rests on now is the open question. With no official website, any value depends on the contracts still being used through other routes and on holders ever voting to switch fees on. Blur has said nothing on either point. Coindaro does not give investment advice.

Blast: withdraw through the interface by 26 October

The Blur team launched Blast in November 2023, and it drew more than $1.1 billion of deposits before its mainnet opened in February 2024. On 2 October 2026 it said on X that “we’ve made the difficult decision to wind Blast down”, because the network costs more to run than it earns, Decrypt reported.

Users can withdraw through the normal Blast interface until 26 October 2026. After that, funds can only be reached through the bridge contracts on Ethereum, and Blast has said it will publish instructions before the deadline. The withdrawal delay has been cut to 24 hours, after a pause of about a week while Blast pulled its own assets out of Lido, according to Decrypt and Cointelegraph.

More than $2.3 billion was locked in Blast’s bridge by the time its mainnet launched, according to Decrypt. By the day of the announcement, assets on the chain had shrunk to about $32 million, CoinDesk reported. Its June 2024 airdrop was worth $354 million in BLAST tokens. Cryptopolitan put the chain’s annualised revenue at about $22,700 against about $755,500 in annualised fees.

Exiting through the bridge contracts carries its own risk. L2BEAT, which tracks layer 2 security, lists five keyholders who control the bridge contracts and flags that Blast’s fraud-proof system never fully worked, as reported in coverage of the shutdown. Blast is not alone among layer 2 networks closing this year: Zero Network gave users until 31 July to withdraw, and Silicon Network stopped deposits on 2 September with withdrawals open until 31 December, Decrypt reported.

Abstract shuts on 15 December after Igloo lost “tens of millions”

Abstract, the consumer-focused chain that Igloo launched on mainnet in January 2025, announced its closure on 6 October. Its Migration Hub is blunt: “On December 15, Abstract will be shutting down.” Users must move their assets off the chain by that date. Anything left behind becomes inaccessible.

The hub lists the official routes: the Migration Hub itself, Abstract’s native bridge at native-bridge.abs.xyz and the third-party bridges Stargate, Relay and Jumper. When we checked on 16 October, the abs.xyz home page itself showed no notice, so users who only visit the main site could miss it.

Igloo CEO Luca Netz said the company lost “8 figures”, or tens of millions of dollars, funding the chain over about 18 months, according to Cryptopolitan and Protos. Igloo considered launching a token to keep it going. “Ultimately we decided against this,” Netz wrote. Abstract blamed thin liquidity and a narrow set of apps: “Our growth began to stagnate due to our restricted DeFi ecosystem,” it said, as quoted by Protos.

About $76 million in assets sat on Abstract when the closure was announced, according to DefiLlama data cited by Web3 Is Going Just Great. The chain had onboarded more than 400,000 users and 144 apps, Cryptopolitan reported. Igloo raised more than $11 million in July 2024 in a round led by Founders Fund and will now focus on Pudgy Penguins, its NFTs and the PENGU token.

Some users called the wind-down period too short, Protos reported. Users also found a class-action waiver they must accept before migrating; its exact terms had not been confirmed when this piece was written. This summer Igloo also closed its Pudgy Party game, which had just over 200 active users and needed $2.5 million more to keep running, Protos said.

The wider layer 2 sector is shrinking too. Value locked on Ethereum layer 2 networks peaked above $50 billion in October 2025 and is down about 36% since, with Arbitrum, Base and OP Mainnet holding about 75% of what is left, Cryptopolitan reported.

Porsche closes its 911 NFT club, floor down 92% from mint

The carmaker’s exit came first. “Today, we are announcing the conclusion of the Porsche Web3 project and PIONΞERS CIRCLE,” the @eth_porsche account posted on 1 October. Its Discord becomes a read-only archive and the X account will no longer be updated. The NFTs stay with their holders on-chain. No burn, buyback, migration or redemption was announced, Bitcoin.com News reported.

The collection launched in January 2023 with 7,500 pieces planned at a mint price of 0.911 ETH. Minting was halted after complaints about price and utility, leaving 2,363 in circulation, Cointelegraph reported. The floor price rose above 3 ETH a month after launch and now sits at 0.077 ETH, according to Protos, citing CoinGecko. That is more than 96% below the peak and about 92% below the mint price. With ETH at $2,450 at 07:59 UTC on 16 October, 0.077 ETH is worth roughly $189.

Lifetime volume on OpenSea is about $20 million, but only about $38,000 changed hands in the past year and about $2,900 in the past month. In 2022, Porsche executive Lutz Meschke had promised commitment “for the long haul”, Cointelegraph recalled.

NFT sales fell 70% in a year, to $167 million in September

CryptoSlam’s monthly figures, as reported by Decrypt and Cointelegraph, show the scale of the contraction. Different trackers count NFT trades in different ways, so the figures below come from one source where possible and should not be mixed with other dashboards.

A year ago the picture was mixed rather than collapsing. DappRadar’s report for the third quarter of 2025 counted about $1.6 billion of NFT volume across 18.1 million sales: more trades, each worth less. We found no DappRadar report covering 2026. Statista projects global NFT revenue of $318.3 million for 2026, flat on the year, Decrypt reported.

Other platforms have already gone. Gemini’s Nifty Gateway announced its closure in January 2026, with a withdrawal deadline first set for 23 February and then extended to 23 April. Foundation announced its closure in mid-April after a planned sale to the digital art platform Blackdove fell through, Cointelegraph reported. Binance moved NFT support from its exchange to Binance Wallet, Cointelegraph reported, without giving a date.

OpenSea, the market leader before Blur, postponed its SEA token on 16 March 2026, two weeks before the planned 30 March launch, with no new date. “A delay is a delay. I’m not going to dress it up,” CEO Devin Finzer said, as quoted by Unchained.

Deadlines for Blur, Blend, Blast and Abstract users

Moving assets off Blast or Abstract means using a cross-chain bridge, which costs a transaction fee and, on the native routes, some waiting time. Only start from links published on the projects’ official accounts. Shutdowns attract fake migration sites and impersonators, which is why Blur ended its thread with a warning about fake accounts. Our guide to avoiding crypto scams lists the usual red flags.

Holders of Porsche NFTs or of NFTs bought on Blur do not need to do anything for the tokens to stay in their wallets. They do lose the official community and, for Blur, the main trading venue.

What Blur has not explained

Blur has not said why it is closing or whether the company continues. It has not dated the Blend withdrawal tool or published how much is still lent through Blend. No other team has announced a website for Blur’s contracts, and it is not clear whether aggregators will keep routing orders to them.

The next date to watch is 26 October, when Blast’s normal withdrawal route closes and its bridge instructions are due. Blur’s website follows on 12 November, and Abstract on 15 December.