Blur Retires Its Trading Site on 12 November and Halts Blend Loans

Blur will deprecate blur.io on 12 November, and the marketplace behind the website stays on-chain. The NFT venue said so on Monday 12 October in a thread on X, which also confirmed that BLUR holders keep control of the protocol fee switch. Blend, Blur's NFT-backed lending system, stops matching new loans the same day, and borrowers have until then to repay or let the loans default. No replacement interface has been named. Monthly trading volume on the platform peaked near $1.43 billion in March 2023 and ran under $7 million three years later, on figures The Block credits to Token Terminal.

Only the front end

The thread was careful about its scope. "This deprecation only applies to the frontend," Blur wrote, and the contracts keep working once the site is gone. Anyone who wants to trade can reach them directly or through a third-party interface, which is what the protocol's own wording promises.

"The Blur marketplace protocol will remain operational on-chain, and $BLUR will continue to control its fee switch," Blur said in Monday's thread.

The same thread told users to "beware of impersonators and fraudulent announcements", a line worth repeating in the four weeks before a widely used site stops answering. Blur has not publicly blamed operating losses for the decision, on cryptonews.com's reading of the announcement. Blast, the Ethereum layer 2 built by Blur founder Tieshun Roquerre and the same core team, did cite costs above revenue when it announced its own wind-down on 2 October.

Six pages, six readings of one day

Where the coverage falls apart is the token. TechFlow, republished by KuCoin at 03:03 UTC on Tuesday, has BLUR down about 16% over 24 hours and below $0.015. The Block, filing at 5:49 p.m. ET on Monday, has it down more than 20% to around $0.015 for a market cap near $44 million, and cryptonews.com repeats the same drop on Tuesday morning with a CoinGecko market cap of about $38.75 million. TokenPost, three minutes before the KuCoin item, has 32.7% and a price of $0.01275. Cryptowisser has more than 33% and about $36 million, with "over 20%" in its own page description and $0.012 in a subheading. Crypto Times declined to pick a number at all, describing a fall somewhere between the high single digits and more than 30%.

None of the six pages says when its 24-hour window opened or closed. We could not establish which tally supersedes which, and the market-cap figures are no closer: $44 million, $38.75 million and $36 million describe the same token on the same day. The all-time high is not in dispute. Crypto Times puts it at $5.02 on 14 February 2023, and The Block has the token above $5 in early 2023 without naming a date.

Blend borrowers have four weeks

Blend arrived in 2023 as a way to borrow against an NFT, and its matching engine switches off with the site. "Blend will stop matching new loans on November 12, 2026," Blur said. Loans outstanding on that date default, and lenders can claim the collateral. Blur has promised a front-end tool afterwards for withdrawing what is left, with no date attached to the promise.

Approvals outlive the website

One exposure survives the shutdown, and it is the kind that contracts left live after their interface goes tend to carry. Crypto Times reports that outstanding Blur approvals still cover NFTs worth tens of millions of dollars, and that Quit, the vice-president of blockchain at Yuga Labs, has told holders to revoke them. No other outlet carries that advice, and Blur's thread says nothing about approvals. A site that stops answering does not withdraw the permissions granted through it. Whether most holders revoke anything before 12 November is the part of this nobody can report yet.