On November 12, the blur.io frontend will be shut down, but the protocol will continue to operate on-chain.

Written by: Ma He, Foresight News

On October 13, Blur announced that the blur.io frontend will officially cease operations on November 12 this year. The announcement stated that this adjustment is limited to the frontend interface, while the Blur market protocol will continue to run on-chain, and the BLUR token will still control the protocol fee switch. On the same day, its NFT lending protocol Blend will stop matching new loans, and borrowers must repay before the deadline or accept default; after that, the official will provide frontend tools to assist with asset withdrawals.

After the announcement, the BLUR token plummeted from $0.018 to $0.0127, with a decline of over 30% in 24 hours. Its current market cap is over $37 million, with an FDV of $38.69 million. The South Korean exchange Upbit announced that it has listed BLUR as a trading warning asset, and the deposit and withdrawal services have been suspended.

Foresight News reminds that the Blur Pool related contracts (Blast Network, address 0xB772d5C5F4A2Eef67dfbc89AA658D2711341b8E5) do not show ETH balances on the frontend, and users with a remaining balance can interact directly with the contract via the blockchain explorer to complete withdrawals.

Currently, the CEO of SuShi has publicly inquired via Twitter whether they should acquire Blur and expressed a willingness to talk with the Blur team.

Monthly trading volume drops from $1.4 billion to less than $12 million

Blur officially launched in October 2022, founded by Pacman, positioned as an NFT market for professional traders, with zero platform fees, bulk operations, and aggregation features, supported by institutions like Paradigm. In February 2023, the platform completed its first quarterly airdrop, distributing about 360 million BLUR tokens. After the airdrop, trading volume surged rapidly. According to The Block data, the peak monthly trading volume in March 2023 was about $1.43 billion, with a market share reaching approximately 80%, while OpenSea's share was significantly compressed during the same period. OpenSea subsequently adjusted its fee and royalty policies in response.

On May 1, 2023, Blur launched Blend in collaboration with Paradigm, adopting a peer-to-peer perpetual lending model, achieving zero reliance on oracles and no fixed term. After launching, Blend quickly became an important protocol in the NFT lending sector, further expanding the platform's influence among professional traders. At that time, Blur leveraged its advantages in incentives and tools to rapidly rewrite the market share landscape of Ethereum NFT trading.

Entering the second half of 2023, trading volumes began to decline continuously. After the airdrop season ended, incentives weakened, and organic trading did not take over. The NFT market as a whole has contracted over the long term since the peaks of 2021-2022, with both blue-chip floor prices and trading activity showing significant declines.

For example, the floor price of Bored Apes is currently around 5 ETH, down over 95% from its peak of approximately 153.7 ETH (over $400,000) in 2022.

The floor price of Azuki has further dropped to around 0.5 ETH (approximately $1,500), having shrunk over $100,000 from its historical high. CryptoPunks have shown relative resilience, maintaining a floor price of around 31.5 ETH (approximately $80,000), but still significantly down from their historical highs, and daily transactions are extremely sparse, often with only a few trades per day.

Even the recently performing Pudgy Penguins, despite events like billionaires buying in bulk leading to a short-term increase in transactions, still lack the absolute volume necessary to reverse the downturn of the overall market.

According to Dune's latest data, in September of this year, Blur's monthly transaction volume was around $12 million, with daily transaction volume remaining at around $400,000.

The layer two network Blast, created by Pacman, also attracted significant funds due to airdrop expectations, with its TVL exceeding $2 billion at one point, but after launching on the mainnet, activity and income continued to decline, announcing a gradual shutdown on October 2, 2026.

Blur and Blast together reflect the inherent flaws of the Paradigm model driven by airdrop expectations. This leveraged flywheel created an illusion of extreme prosperity in the short term, but once the expectations for incentives ran out, locked-in funds would drain and the number of active addresses would plummet, causing the gears of the Ponzi flywheel to completely jam, leading to projects that were once valued at hundreds of millions of dollars to bleed out instantly.

Abstract also announced its conclusion around the same time. The growth model driven by incentives has repeatedly appeared in the NFT market and some Layer 2 projects: rapidly attracting funds through airdrops and revenue expectations, but when incentives wane, organic activity and income cannot cover operating costs.

It is worth noting that the shutdown of the Blur frontend does not mean the protocol will stop operating immediately, but the actual usability has significantly decreased. If professional traders have the capability for on-chain operations, they can still continue to interact with the protocol; ordinary users, however, face a significantly increased barrier to entry.

Fee revenue approaches zero in the last 30 days

The Blur protocol fee switch is still controlled by BLUR, but its actual ability to capture fees will depend on the continuous usage of the on-chain protocol.

Of the total supply of 3 billion BLUR, core contributors (the team) took 29% (about 870 million), and early investors (VCs like Paradigm) took 18.8% (about 564 million), together accounting for nearly half of the total.

Regarding BLUR unlocks, about 97% of the supply has entered circulation, with remaining releases continuing until mid-2027, but the monthly scale has shrunk to just over 1% of the total, and the structural selling pressure from token unlocks is nearing an end.

On April 18, 2025, Blur transferred 23.8 million unlocked tokens to Coinbase Prime, having cumulatively transferred about 1.068 billion tokens (about 35.6% of the total supply), valued at approximately $340 million based on the then-current price, with an average transfer price of about $0.318. Following this, data from SpotOnChain tracking shows that the team repeatedly transferred to Coinbase after token unlocks.

If calculated using the conservative weighted average price of $0.35 to $0.4 during the main distribution phase, the actual profit extracted by the project party and the behind-the-scenes VCs from this protocol is estimated conservatively between $350 million and $400 million.

According to the latest data from DeFiLlama, the protocol's cumulative historical fees are about $70 million, but the fees in the last 30 days have approached zero, and the annualized income is negligible.

The so-called "fee switch" is premised on having enough real trading volume. With monthly trading volume having dropped to low levels and the frontend about to close, even if charging begins, the absolute income scale is unlikely to provide meaningful support for token valuation.

BLUR has substantially devolved into a zombie protocol governance token lacking value capture ability. The on-chain contracts can still operate, and token holders still control the fee switch, but without active user entry points and continuous trading demand, the actual value of this switch has diminished significantly.

Thus, this game of musical chairs has finally come to an end. The dealer has long gracefully exited with hundreds of millions of dollars in real cash, leaving the retail investors holding the "fee switch" with no fees to collect, reminiscing in the desolate on-chain contracts about an NFT bull market that will never return.