Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)
Author | Sudi Xia @ Odaily Planet Daily
Blur has shut down! Honestly, I was taken aback when I saw this news.
Blur, the platform that once dominated OpenSea and accounted for over 80% of Ethereum NFT trading volume, recently announced that the blur.io frontend will be officially shut down on November 12, 2026.
Of course, the frontend shutdown does not mean the entire project is gone—the on-chain market protocol is still operational, and the BLUR token will continue to exist.
Even more concerning is Blend—the NFT lending protocol under Blur—which also halted the matching of new loans on the same day. Users who have already borrowed should note that it’s best to repay their loans before November 12 to avoid default. Blur has stated that a frontend tool will be released later to help users withdraw their assets from Blend, but “later” remains undefined.
What happens if you default? Blend operates peer-to-peer perpetual lending with no fixed maturity date—it relies entirely on refinancing auctions to continue. If no one bids and the auction rate hits its maximum, your position will be liquidated, and lenders can immediately claim your collateral NFT. Don’t take chances—repay as soon as you can.
Most importantly, immediately revoke your previous approvals for Blur and its related products. Blur’s official team has also warned that discontinued or deprecated protocols typically have no ongoing security support or audits, and you may not even be able to contact the team later. If you’d like to use a tool to clean up your approvals, visit Revoke.cash to revoke them.
What specific tasks need to be done?
First, check your wallet to see if you previously borrowed ETH on Blend using NFTs as collateral; if so, make sure to repay it in full before November 12 to avoid default.
Second, connect your wallet to Revoke.cash and revoke all permissions granted to Blur, Blend, and their related smart contracts.
Third, if you previously placed sell or buy orders on Blur, now is the time to cancel them while the frontend is still active. Although the on-chain protocol is still operational, without an official frontend, your orders will be like notices on an abandoned bulletin board—very unlikely to ever be filled.
Yuga Labs Vice President 0xQuit stated that there are still NFTs worth millions of dollars currently authorized under Blur’s contract. Although he checked around and hasn’t found any existing vulnerabilities in the contract, the issue is that these contracts are upgradeable. Just because there’s no vulnerability today doesn’t mean there won’t be tomorrow—what if malicious logic is introduced during a future upgrade? At that point, your monkeys, penguins, and CryptoPunks would still be on their authorization list, effectively leaving your wallet wide open for someone to empty it.
Regarding the token, after the news broke, the BLUR price plummeted, hitting a low of $0.014 during trading, a 15.31% drop over 24 hours. Additionally, BLUR token unlocks will continue until February 2027, with significant selling pressure still ahead.
Interestingly, the founder of Blur, "Pacman," is also shutting down his L2 project, Blast, on October 26. The entire L2 ecosystem is entering a淘汰 phase, with the NFT trading layer being the first to collapse. As for OpenSea’s token launch, there’s still no news this year.
What’s next for “Tieshun” (Pacman)? He hasn’t said what he plans to do next. The Blast shutdown announcement only included a formal statement: “We regret that we weren’t able to make this chain sustainably long-term, and thank the users, developers, and teams who gave Blast its moments.” Since then, there’s been no further update—no new project announced, and no indication of a complete exit from the space.
Moonrock Capital CEO Simon Dedic directly criticized, saying that people like Pacman, who have secured investments from top-tier institutions and already established market dominance, are not focusing on long-term development but instead choosing to maximize short-term exits and cash out quickly. His words are harsh, but when you look at Blast’s data, it’s hard to defend—the TVL has dropped from a peak of $2.7 billion to just tens of millions, and fee revenue has plummeted from over $3.6 million to only $2,000. This is clearly the classic pattern of using an airdrop to spike metrics and then disappearing.
From Blur to Blast, these two projects surged primarily through airdrop incentives to boost trading volume, both reaching impressive peaks before ultimately shutting down under the excuse of unsustainable operational costs. As for the individual behind them, after cashing out, he disappears for a while, then reappears a couple of years later under a new alias—something that’s far from unusual in the crypto space.
It’s rather poignant to think that back in March 2022, when Blur had just raised its $11 million seed round led by Paradigm, with eGirl Capital and 0xMaki among its backers, who didn’t think this was the next big thing in the NFT market?
Everyone knows what happened next—the airdrop seasons came one after another, offering points just for placing orders or making bids, and users flooded in like crazy. In early 2023, Blur’s trading volume pushed OpenSea into second place, peaking at 84% of the Ethereum NFT market share. A small team of just a dozen people forced the industry leader to hastily introduce zero fees in response—back then, who in crypto didn’t talk about Blur?
Then what? The entire NFT market has cooled off: Blur’s monthly trading volume, which peaked at $1.43 billion, dropped to less than $7 million by March 2026. OpenSea is also struggling—over a hundred crypto projects have shut down across the industry by 2026. From reigning champion to frontend shutdown, it’s been barely four years.
This final tear speaks of Blur, but also of the entire NFT community.