Blur Is Shutting Its Doors on November 12 and NFT Collectors Are Cheering: Inside the End of the Royalty Wars

Blur, the NFT marketplace that once knocked OpenSea off its throne by starting a bidding war over creator royalties, says it is shutting down its website on November 12 — and a vocal crowd of NFT collectors greeted the news with something close to celebration.

By Jordan Lee | October 19, 2026

The announcement came last week through Blur’s account on X, according to Cointelegraph. It was the project’s first post on the platform in more than a year. The company said the frontend — the website ordinary users interact with — will close on November 12, while its onchain marketplace, the underlying machinery that lives on the blockchain itself, will keep running. For everyday collectors, though, a dead website is effectively a dead product, which is why the market read this as Blur folding its tent.

The Hook: A Shutdown With a Deadline Attached

There is one date that matters if you ever used Blur’s lending product. Blend, a peer-to-peer protocol that lets people borrow against their NFTs, will stop matching new loans. Borrowers have until November 12 to repay outstanding loans or let them default, Blur said. The company also promised a withdrawal interface after the shutdown, so assets stuck in the system should have an exit door — but anyone with an open Blend position should not wait until the last minute to test that promise.

Think of it like a bank announcing it is closing the branch but leaving the vault open for one more month: you can still get your things out, but only if you show up before the doors lock.

On-Chain Evidence: Why Collectors Are Cheering Instead of Mourning

The reaction was unusually raw. “Good riddance. You destroyed NFTs. Please shut down and never come back,” wrote one collector, Cryptobscure, in a reply on X. Another, going by starfruit, posted: “You may not have been able to complete your mission to destroy NFTs. But you acted with extreme determination and tried everything. Congratulations to us for surviving you.”

To understand the bitterness, you have to remember what Blur actually did. When it launched on October 19, 2022 — exactly four years before this month’s shutdown notice — it let sellers customize royalty payments while dangling larger token rewards to those who paid higher creator royalties. In plain English: it turned royalties, the cut artists get every time their work resells, into an optional tip.

The timing mattered. Blur entered a market where protections were already weakening — rival marketplace Magic Eden had moved to optional royalties the previous week, Cointelegraph notes. Blur’s aggressive incentives then supercharged the race to the bottom. Blockchain analytics platform Nansen reported that effective creator royalty fees fell to 0.6 percent in July 2023, down from an average of 2.5 percent in 2022, attributing much of that drop to Blur’s growth and to OpenSea lowering its own requirements to compete.

• 2.5 percent — the average effective royalty rate creators actually received in 2022, before the royalty wars
• 0.6 percent — the effective royalty rate by July 2023, after Blur’s rise, according to Nansen
• November 12 — the deadline for Blend borrowers to repay loans or default

The Core Conflict: Traders Won, Creators Lost

Blur’s model rewarded professional flippers — traders who sweep up collections with bids, churn volume, and farm the token rewards. For them, lower royalties meant lower costs and fatter margins. For artists, it meant watching income they had budgeted around evaporate. That is the real fight underneath this shutdown: not crypto versus regulators, but two groups of users who wanted opposite things from the same marketplace.

Blur did not explain why it is shuttering the frontend, and Cointelegraph reported that it had reached out to founder Tieshun “Pacman” Roquerre for comment. But the backdrop is hard to ignore.

Market Implications: A Shrinking Pie, Not Just One Exit

Blur is not an isolated casualty — it is the latest in a line of NFT platforms heading for the exits. Gemini-owned Nifty Gateway and social collecting platform Rodeo announced plans to wind down in January, Cointelegraph previously reported. Foundation announced its closure in April after a sale meant to keep it alive fell through. Binance ended NFT support on its main exchange, shifting asset management to Binance Wallet.

The market they are leaving behind is a fraction of its former self. Data from CryptoSlam shows total NFT sales in September came in at 167 million USD across roughly 2.9 million transactions. At the peak in January 2022, monthly sales hit 6 billion USD over 13.7 million transactions. That is a collapse of more than 95 percent from the top — and it explains why a marketplace that once led the volume charts cannot justify keeping the lights on.

For regular investors, the practical takeaways are simple. First, if you have an open Blend loan, calendar the November 12 repayment deadline now. Second, if you hold NFTs, the number of places to sell them keeps shrinking, which can mean worse prices when you need to exit quickly. Third, creators shopping for a marketplace in 2026 should look at what percentage of sales actually reaches artists, not just headline volume.

The Verdict: The End of an Era, Not the End of NFTs

Blur changed the NFT business forever — mostly by making it cheaper to trade and far less profitable to create. Its website closing is a symbolic end to the royalty wars it helped start. The collectors cheering its exit are betting that a smaller, calmer market can rebuild around artists again. That is a hope, not a guarantee. What is certain is that an eight-figure-sales market with fewer middlemen looks very different from the 2022 frenzy, and anyone still holding NFTs should plan around the market that exists today, not the one they remember.

The cryptocurrency market remains highly volatile. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice.