Ethereum NFT Marketplace Blur Faces Closure After Volumes Crash 99 Percent

Blur, which was previously the biggest marketplace to trade Ethereum non-fungible tokens (NFTs), will close its website next month following a 99 percent reduction in trading since hitting a high due to a second consecutive pullback in ten days for the projects created by cryptocurrency entrepreneur Tieshun Roquerre. According to The Marketplace, its website will shut down on November 12, whereas its NFT lending platform, Blend, will discontinue offering new loans. Borrowers will have up to this date to settle their loans or let them default. A different mechanism will be available after this date for withdrawal of assets from Blend.  

Blur Captured More Than 70 Percent of Ethereum NFT Trading in March 2023

The move comes after the October 2 shutdown announcement by Blast, an Ethereum scaling platform that was built by the same Pacman who developed Blur. Blast has previously seen more than $2 billion (roughly Rs. 19,040 crore) in value locked onto its network, in part due to rewards for users who made deposits into the network. The amount had fallen to about $32 million (roughly Rs. 305 crore) at the time the development team announced the shutdown, stating that the network incurred costs higher than its revenues.

Launched in 2022, it was designed to challenge the then-dominant OpenSea by providing faster transactions, lower fees, and token rewards for professional traders. This allowed Blur to win more than 70 percent of Ethereum NFT trading volume in March 2023, when trading on the platform stood at around $1.43 billion (roughly Rs. 13,602 crore), according to DefiLlama. That volume was reduced to below $7 million (roughly Rs. 67 crore) by March 2026, representing a drop of more than 99.5 percent.

However, the exchange of Blur did not generate any revenue from transaction fees from all that trading activity. The platform did not charge anything from traders, and Token Terminal shows $0 in protocol revenue in the last three years, despite billions of dollars worth of NFT trades through the platform. However, the revenue cannot tell whether Blur made money through lending or other operations.

The controversial incentive program implemented by Blur has been blamed for promoting speculation and causing pressure on the royalties received by the creators of the NFTs. The statistics themselves do not show the amount of actual purchases that were made, but rather speculation. However, unlike Blast, Blur did not explain its shutdown using financial losses. It continues to promote its no marketplace fees and over $7.4 billion (roughly Rs. 70,448 crore) in trading volume ever, which is a good example of how fast it was growing at one point.

BLUR saw an immediate sell-off after the announcement, dropping by 29.1 percent over the last 24 hours. As per data from CoinGecko, the token was priced at $0.01341 (roughly Rs. 0.95) at press time, with its market cap valued at around $38.75 million (roughly Rs. 369 crore). The cryptocurrency traded in the range of $0.01267 (roughly Rs. 0.95) to $0.01909 (roughly Rs. 1.9) in the same period.

In 2024, crypto exchange Kraken also shut down its NFT marketplace almost two years after the platform was launched, saying it's shifting more resources into new products and services. “Clients have been informed of the changes, and our team will support them as they move their NFTs to their Kraken Wallet or a self-custodial wallet of choice,” was the statement from a Kraken spokesperson during the wind-down process.