Author: Nancy, PANews
Shortly after star L2 project Blast announced its shutdown, the NFT marketplace Blur, which shares the same lineage, is also about to take its final bow.
Looking back at the frenzy cycle of the NFT market, Blur once used aggressive strategies such as zero royalties, liquidity mining, and points airdrops to quickly shake OpenSea's long-standing dominance, staging a textbook vampire attack. However, the prosperity Blur built by piling up trading incentives may have planted the seeds of today's exit from the very beginning.
Blur Is About to Disable Its Frontend; for Safety, Users Should Revoke Authorizations
On October 13, Blur announced that the blur.io website frontend will be disabled on November 12, 2026. This adjustment only involves the frontend; the Blur marketplace protocol will still run on-chain, and BLUR will continue to control its fee switch.
At the same time, its NFT lending protocol Blend will stop matching new loans on the same day. Borrowers can repay their loans before that date or choose to let the loans default. After that date, Blur will provide frontend tools to help users withdraw assets from Blend.
Strictly speaking, this is not a complete shutdown, but more of a soft shutdown.
The on-chain protocol still exists, but with the main traffic gateway ceasing operations, even if the fee switch remains, it will be difficult for BLUR to capture token value.
Affected by this news, CoinGecko data shows that over the past 24 hours, BLUR fell about 31.9%, and the token price is currently down more than 99.7% from its peak.
Regarding Blur's exit, some users recall the experience of frantically farming points and gaming airdrops back then, saying bluntly that it was a period of making real money through speculation; more voices believe this day should have come long ago. They argue that Blur pushed NFT trading further toward financialization and speculation, causing the cultural value originally formed around collecting, creation, and community identity to gradually give way to trading volume, floor prices, and short-term arbitrage. NFTs also became, to a certain extent, a tool for high-frequency trading and points-farming games, while the long-term value and cultural significance of the collectibles themselves were marginalized.
In addition to business contraction, the disabling of Blur's frontend also carries potential contract security risks. Yuga Labs blockchain vice president Quit posted a reminder that after Blur announced it would abandon its frontend, his investigation found no vulnerabilities in Blur's existing contracts, but these contracts support upgrades and could be changed into malicious contracts at any time. There are still tens of millions of dollars worth of NFTs with open authorizations to Blur contracts, and their security actually depends on the operational security of the Blur team, which appears to be dissolving. He suggested that users with unrevoked authorizations to Blur immediately revoke them through tools such as revoke.cash to guard against potential contract vulnerabilities or subsequent upgrade risks.
He also mentioned that last month, contracts related to NFT marketplace Magic Eden were exploited in a vulnerability incident involving millions of dollars, and he had helped recover a considerable portion of the funds. This incident highlights the risk of continuously retaining contract authorizations, especially as attackers gain stronger vulnerability discovery tools.
From Overtaking OpenSea to a Quiet Exit, Blur Is Trapped by Its Incentive Trap
Blur rose because of incentives, and it fell because of incentives.
Blur was founded by Pacman, and the same core team also developed the Layer 2 project Blast. With Blur's rapid rise in the NFT market, Pacman was once regarded as a young genius in the crypto industry. However, now Blur has announced the disabling of its frontend, and Blast has also moved toward shutdown one after another. Projects that were once immensely popular are successively falling into exit dilemmas.
Looking back at Blur's rise, at that time the NFT market was already showing signs of cooling, but Blur bucked the trend and broke through with points airdrops, zero platform fees, and flexible royalty strategies, quickly attracting a large number of major NFT traders and airdrop hunters, and shaking OpenSea's market dominance in a short period.
At its peak in March 2023, Blur's monthly trading volume reached more than $1.4 billion, and its market share once climbed to about 80%. The subsequently launched NFT lending protocol Blend also expanded rapidly, occupying more than 80% of the NFT lending market at its peak. Whether in spot trading or NFT lending, the Pacman team demonstrated strong product operations capabilities.
However, behind the impressive data was a growth flywheel highly dependent on trading incentives. A large number of trades revolved around points and airdrop expectations, and some users competed for rewards by wash trading. At the same time, the royalty battle sparked by Blur further compressed creators' income space and weakened project parties' motivation to continue participating.
This also trapped Blur in a dilemma. When reward expectations weaken, user activity may decline accordingly; if it continues to rely on token incentives to maintain trading heat, it may increase token circulation and selling pressure. How to convert traffic driven by speculation and airdrops into sustainable user demand has always been a problem Blur failed to solve.
As the NFT market continues to recede, Blur's trading activity is long gone from its former levels. According to The Block, Blur's monthly trading volume has now plunged to about $5.1 million. DeFiLlama data shows that its daily active addresses have also fallen from tens of thousands at their peak to only a few hundred or even fewer for a long time, while on-chain fees have long been at zero. The trading incentives that once supported the platform's rapid rise are now far from enough to sustain its former market heat.
A similar dilemma has appeared at Blast. This star L2, which once used points incentives to attract capital and users, announced its shutdown on October 2, citing operating costs exceeding revenue and an unsustainable business model. The successive exits of Blur and Blast once again expose the limitations of incentive-driven growth models. Although this kind of play can amplify market heat and attract capital in the short term, it does not necessarily build a sustainable business model.
It is worth mentioning that OpenSea, which once fell behind in the NFT trading war, has now regained its position as market leader. However, against the backdrop of an overall downturn in the NFT market, whether the long-unfulfilled airdrop expectations and its expansion into new businesses such as token trading can help OpenSea escape its growth dilemma and survive the NFT winter remains to be seen.
And several months ago, the community had already speculated that Pacman would shift his strategic focus to a new project, Trench.com, which is seen as a Meme trading terminal benchmarked against products such as Fomo. Public information about it is currently limited.
To some extent, Blur both fueled the prosperity of the NFT market and intensified its speculation and decline. Now, as Blur heads toward its exit, this once spectacular airdrop incentive experiment has also reached its moment of clearing out.