Blur closes on November 12: what matters now for NFT holders

Blur is switching off its website on November 12, 2026. The marketplace, which at one point served more than seven out of ten NFTs traded on Ethereum, announced the step on October 12 via its channel on X; CoinDesk reported on it on October 13. For you that means open bids, listed collectibles and above all outstanding loans from the Blend lending product need a decision before that date. The contracts on the Ethereum blockchain keep running; the interface does not.

The BLUR token has reacted sharply to the announcement: $0.0123 on the morning of October 13, down 33.9 percent within 24 hours and 39.4 percent over seven days. The token's all-time low stands at $0.01228. The price is therefore sitting practically on it.

What Blur switches off on November 12 and what keeps running

What goes dark is the blur.io website, meaning the interface through which traders browse collections, place bids and list items for sale. The smart contracts on Ethereum stay in operation, according to the CoinDesk report. Smart contract refers to the program code on the blockchain that actually settles a trade and records the transfer of ownership. Front end refers to the website in front of it, which makes offers visible and matches orders.

That separation decides what you are left with after November 12. An NFT in your wallet belongs to you regardless of whether the marketplace still runs a website: ownership sits in a contract on the blockchain, not in a provider's database. When the interface disappears, what disappears with it is the convenient route to buying and selling in this one place. Anyone wanting to sell then needs a different venue.

Blur took no fees from traders. Token Terminal shows zero dollars of protocol revenue for the past three years, as CoinDesk reports. Whether the operator earned money through the lending business or by other routes cannot be read from that, and the report makes no statement on it. The website itself still carries the promise of zero marketplace fees and a lifetime volume of more than $7.4 billion.

Blend: why outstanding NFT loans have to be settled by November 12

Blend is Blur's lending product: a holder deposits an NFT as collateral and receives ether for it, while a lender earns interest on it. From November 12 Blend will no longer arrange new loans. Anyone who does not repay an outstanding loan by then lets it run into default. With a loan against collateral, default means the deposited collateral passes to the lender.

Blur intends to provide a tool of its own after the cut-off date with which balances can be withdrawn from Blend. The company has given no date for it, according to the CoinDesk report. The gap between the shutdown and a tool without a date allows only one conclusion: repayment before November 12 is the route that does not depend on an announcement.

A loan against a collectible is no sideshow. Anyone who deposited an NFT as collateral two years ago, and whose market price has fallen since, faces the question of whether repayment makes economic sense at all or whether default would be the cheaper option. That calculation depends on the item's current market value, on the size of the remaining debt and on your tax position, not on a general rule.

From market leader to run-off: Blur's trading volume since March 2023

Blur launched at the end of 2022 and took on the market leader of the day with a model that charged no trading fees and rewarded heavy traders with tokens. In March 2023 monthly trading volume stood at around $1.43 billion according to the DefiLlama data cited by CoinDesk, and more than 70 percent of Ethereum NFT trading ran through this one marketplace. In March 2026 it was less than $7 million a month. The decline amounts to more than 99.5 percent.

$22.9 million in the protocol: our assessment as of October 13, 2026

How far the marketplace has already emptied out can be read from the funds still sitting in its protocol. On October 13, 2026 that was $22.9 million. A week earlier there was still $26.8 million, a year ago $81.5 million, and at the peak on March 9, 2024 it was $215.9 million. Against that peak roughly 89 percent has flowed out, against the same day last year roughly 72 percent. cryptoticker.io gathered this assessment itself on October 13, 2026, based on DefiLlama's protocol data for Blur.

The figures show two different movements. The long outflow over twelve months is the drying up of NFT trading as a whole. The loss of just under four million dollars in the week of the announcement is the response to it: anyone with a loan outstanding is pulling their collateral out while the interface for doing so is still standing.

BLUR token at the level of its all-time low

After the announcement the token lost more than 20 percent and stood at around $0.015, as CoinDesk presents it; Coingape reported more than 30 percent. Our own query on the morning of October 13 produced $0.0123 and a loss of 33.9 percent over 24 hours. The spread between the figures is explained by the timing of each measurement; the price fell further over the course of the day.

Two metrics are more notable here than the percentage. First, market capitalisation stands at $35.7 million, while tokens worth $63.6 million changed hands in 24 hours. Turnover therefore exceeds total value by a wide margin, which points to a wave of selling rather than to calm trading. Second, the price is at the level of the all-time low of $0.01228. From its peak of $5.02 on February 14, 2023, the token is more than 99 percent away.

One peculiarity remains for token holders: according to the CoinDesk report they keep control of the so-called fee switch, meaning the vote on whether the marketplace charges trading fees in future. A voting right over the fees of a marketplace without a website is, however, a right with no discernible value as long as nobody runs a new interface for it.

Blast, Blur and the retreat of a whole team

The step does not stand alone. On October 2 the Blast network announced its wind-down; according to CoinDesk it was developed by the team behind Blur and goes back to founder Tieshun Roquerre. Blast managed more than two billion dollars at its peak and came to about $32 million at the time of the announcement. Users there have until October 26 to withdraw their funds through the familiar interface. Blast's developers cited operating costs exceeding revenues as the reason. For Blur itself, no such justification has been stated publicly.

Two shutdowns from the same circle within two weeks make a pattern with practical consequences for you: deadlines from different projects can overlap. Anyone with funds at both Blast and Blend has two dates, October 26 and November 12, and no shared interface to remind them. We described the same mechanics in October for another deadline, when Galxe's Gravity Alpha ended on November 1.

Token approvals: the underrated risk after a shutdown

Anyone trading through a marketplace will as a rule have granted its contracts an authorisation, a so-called token approval. That approval allows the contract to transfer a particular NFT out of the wallet as soon as a sale goes through. Such an approval stays granted even when the website disappears, because it sits on the blockchain and not on the website.

From that follows a task that applies to every old approval, quite apart from Blur: old approvals that are no longer needed should be revoked. Through an approval checker, of the kind common blockchain explorers offer, you can see which contracts still have access to your collection and revoke individual approvals. That attackers work deliberately with faked approval prompts is something we described last week in the case of the fake Shiba Inu airdrop of October 12.

Two points matter here. First, every revocation costs network fees on Ethereum, because it is a transaction. Second, around every announced shutdown there circulate messages that use a deadline as leverage and lead to a copied site. You revoke an approval only through an address you have typed in yourself, never through a link in a message.

NFT custody without a marketplace: wallet, keys, records

After November 12, access to your collectibles hangs on your wallet alone. Anyone who has managed their NFTs through a marketplace interface so far should therefore check three things: whether the wallet address holding the items belongs to you and not to a custodian, whether you can restore access to that wallet independently of any single app, and whether the backup of that access is kept somewhere you can reach it if it comes to that. For the custody of larger holdings we keep a separate overview of hardware wallets compared.

For reselling you need a different venue. Which marketplaces carry Ethereum collections, what fees they charge and how they handle creator royalties is set out in our overview of NFT marketplaces. One point that is regularly overlooked in Germany: the European MiCA regulation covers crypto assets, but not NFTs as individual items, as long as they really are unique and not interchangeable with one another. Authorisation under MiCA is therefore not a criterion you can take for granted at an NFT marketplace the way you can at an exchange.

Tax in Germany: holding period, default and records

For tax purposes the German authorities regularly treat gains from the sale of NFTs by private individuals as a private disposal under section 23 of the Income Tax Act, with the familiar one-year holding period. A default on a loan against collateral is not a neutral event in this context, because the collateral changes owner, and that can have the effect of a disposal. How your case is to be classified depends on holding period, acquisition cost and the structure of the contract.

In practice that means one thing above all: the records should be secured now, not at tax-return time. Once the website is switched off, trading history and loan overview will no longer be available there for download. Anyone who has not already recorded their purchases, sales and lending transactions in a portfolio tracker or tax tool should export the documents before November 12.

Our assessment: a retreat with notice

In the view of this newsroom, Blur's retreat is the consequence of a business model without a revenue source, not of a sudden collapse. The evidence is set out above: zero dollars of protocol revenue over three years according to Token Terminal, a trading volume that has fallen from $1.43 billion a month to under $7 million, and protocol funds that have shrunk by around 89 percent since the peak in March 2024. A marketplace without fees needs growth to justify token rewards; once the growth fails to appear, the case for running it falls away.

Against that, the market as a whole is not disappearing: the contracts on Ethereum keep running, the collections stay tradable, and other interfaces exist. What ends is an era of cheap trading incentives. We draw no valuation of the BLUR token from this; with a price at its all-time low and a voting right over a business that is no longer running, the risk of a total loss for investors is real.

Blur shutdown: bids and Blend loans run until November 12

1. Settle loans and bids. Check by November 12 whether a loan in your name is outstanding at Blend, and decide deliberately between repayment and default. Open bids and listings are withdrawn in the same move. If you need a new venue for selling, the alternatives are in our overview of NFT marketplaces.
2. Revoke approvals and sort out custody. Withdraw old token approvals through a blockchain explorer and make sure access to your wallet works independently of any single application. For larger holdings it is worth a look at the hardware wallet comparison.
3. Export your records. Save trading history and loan overview before the shutdown and transfer them into a tax tool or a portfolio tracker, so that holding periods remain provable later on.

(As of October 13, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)