On November 12, 2026, Blur will turn off its blur.io website. Blur was once the biggest NFT marketplace on Ethereum. Blend, its lending protocol, will stop matching new loans on the same day. The smart contracts stay live onchain, and NFTs sitting in user wallets are not touched by the shutdown. Anyone with an open Blend loan now has a matter of hours to repay it or let it default.
The closure reaches past art and profile picture collections to Ethereum game assets. A lot of web3 games mint in-game items, characters and land as NFTs on Ethereum and related networks, and players depend on marketplaces to trade them.
What is shutting down
The decision was first posted on Blur’s official X account on October 12. Traders used the blur.io frontend to buy, sell and place bids on Ethereum NFTs, and it will be deprecated on November 12.
According to Blur, only the website is closing. The marketplace smart contracts will go on running on Ethereum, and the BLUR token will keep control of the protocol’s fee switch. Since most regular users traded through the website, the loss of blur.io still means the end of Blur as a day-to-day trading venue.
Blend borrowers face the hardest deadline
Blur’s peer-to-peer NFT lending protocol, Blend, is hit hardest. From November 12 it will no longer match new loans. Anyone with an outstanding Blend loan has to repay before the cutoff or let the loan default. When a loan defaults, the lender usually keeps the NFT posted as collateral. A borrower who put up a valuable NFT and wants it back has only hours left.
Blur says it will release a separate frontend tool after the deadline so users can withdraw assets still sitting in Blend. No release date, link or detailed instructions have been shared yet. Platform shutdowns tend to draw scammers running fake withdrawal sites, so users should trust only links posted on Blur’s official channels.
Blur and crypto investment firm Paradigm launched Blend together in May 2023. Loans on the protocol had no fixed end date and did not use price oracles. A lender could call a loan at any moment, which kicked off a refinancing auction. That design helped Blur dominate NFT lending in the last market cycle.
What holders should check before November 12
NFTs kept in a personal wallet are not going anywhere. They sit on the Ethereum blockchain, not on Blur’s website, so they will still be in the wallet after November 12. Even so, a few items are worth handling before the deadline:
- Open listings and bids. Cancel these on Blur while the site is still up. After the frontend shuts off, non-technical users will find those orders much harder to manage.
- Active Blend loans. Choose between repaying and accepting the default. Waiting until the final minutes is risky if gas fees jump or the website slows under traffic.
- Old token approvals. Plenty of traders gave Blur and Blend contracts permission to move their NFTs. Revoking approvals you no longer use through a trusted approval checker lowers the risk if a contract is ever exploited.
- A new marketplace. Ethereum NFTs can still be traded on other platforms, including OpenSea and Magic Eden.
What it means for web3 game assets
Today, most game assets change hands through in-game marketplaces or larger platforms. Off The Grid (official site) is one example: players can trade gear on its own Marketplace 2.0 and on OpenSea. Games with their own trading systems have less exposure when a third-party marketplace closes.
An NFT owned onchain stays safe in a wallet, yet the platforms around it can still vanish. Assets kept in wallets the player controls are not affected by a shutdown like Blur’s. Items locked inside third-party protocols are another matter, as the Blend collateral situation shows.
How Blur got here
The exit comes after one of the sharpest falls the NFT market has seen. Blur’s monthly trading volume hit a peak of about 1.43 billion USD in March 2023. By March 2026 the figure was under 7 million USD, down more than 99.5%.
The site still lists more than 7.4 billion USD in lifetime trading volume. To win users, Blur charged no trading fees, and most of its growth came from BLUR token rewards that drew traders away from rivals during the 2023 boom. After the shutdown announcement in October, the BLUR token dropped more than 20% to around 0.015 USD.
This autumn, Blur is the second project linked to founder Tieshun Roquerre to wind down. Blast, an Ethereum layer 2 network built by the same team, announced its own wind-down shortly before Blur did.
Once November 12 passes, Blur’s onchain contracts will keep running, while the blur.io interface that once processed billions of dollars in NFT trades will no longer exist.