Ethereum NFT marketplace Blur will shut down its website on November 12, 2026, the team announced, though the marketplace protocol underpinning the platform will remain operational on-chain.

The deprecation applies only to the blur.io frontend, the web interface through which users interact with a protocol's underlying smart contracts. The Blur marketplace protocol itself will continue to operate on-chain, and holders of the BLUR token will continue to control its fee switch, the mechanism that governs how the protocol's fees are handled, the team said.

Blur announced the change in a post on X on October 12:

1/ The frontend will be deprecated on November 12, 2026. This deprecation only applies to the frontend. The Blur marketplace protocol will remain operational on-chain, and $BLUR will continue to control its fee switch.

— Blur (@blur_io) October 12, 2026

Blend, Blur's peer-to-peer NFT lending platform — where loans are matched directly between individual lenders and borrowers — will stop matching new loans on the same date. Borrowers have until then to repay their outstanding loans or allow them to default, and Blur said it will provide a tool afterward to help users withdraw their assets from Blend. The timeline gives borrowers roughly one month from the announcement to settle their positions.

Blur and the NFT market

Blur launched in 2022 with a token airdrop to traders and quickly overtook OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace at the time, in trading volume. Critics later questioned whether its incentives helped crash NFT prices.

The broader NFT market has since shrunk sharply. Global NFT market revenue is projected at $318.3 million in 2026, essentially flat from last year and well below the peaks recorded in 2021 and 2022, according to market statistics firm Statista.

Monthly NFT sales volume fell to $167.2 million in September, down from $554.8 million a year earlier and $1.78 billion in December 2023, according to data from NFT tracker CryptoSlam. That figure is a fraction of the multibillion-dollar monthly totals recorded at the market's peak in 2021 and 2022.

Cheaper NFTs have driven up sales counts even as trading volume has plummeted, according to DappRadar.

The move comes after Blast, the Ethereum layer-2 network launched in November 2023 by the team behind Blur, said earlier this month that it is shutting down because it costs more to run than it earns. Blast drew more than $2.3 billion in deposits by its February 2024 mainnet launch, and has given users until October 26 to withdraw through its interface. The deadlines stack up quickly for users of the team's platforms: Blast's withdrawal deadline arrives first, on October 26; Blend's loan matching and the Blur website shutdown follow on November 12; and the promised tool for withdrawing assets from Blend is due afterward.

This article originally appeared on Decrypt.