Blur is shutting down its website, so why are NFT collectors cheering?

Blur’s planned website closure revived criticism of the royalty policies and token rewards that helped it overtake OpenSea during the NFT boom, but hurt creators. Nonfungible token marketplace Blur, which once overtook OpenSea as the largest NFT marketplace by trading volume, says it is shutting down its website next month — and some NFT collectors couldn’t be happier. Blur >made the announcement on X on Monday, its first post on the platform in more than a year. It said the frontend will shut down on Nov. 12, while its onchain marketplace will remain operational. Blend, a peer-to-peer perpetual NFT lending protocol, will also stop matching new loans. Blur said borrowers have until Nov. 12 to repay outstanding loans or allow them to default. It also promised a withdrawal interface after the shutdown. “Good riddance. You destroyed NFTs. Please shut down and never come back,” said NFT collector Cryptobscure in a reply to the post on X. “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,” NFT collector starfruit said in another post. The post renewed criticism of the strategy that helped Blur reach the top of the NFT charts in 2023: optional creator royalties and token rewards that encouraged traders to bid and flip NFTs. Its rise accelerated a shift toward lower creator royalties, with rival OpenSea later moving to optional creator fees for new collections. Blur launched on Oct. 19, 2022, allowing sellers to customize royalty payments while offering larger prospective token rewards to those who paid higher creator royalties. But it entered a market where royalty protections were already weakening: competing marketplace Magic Eden had moved to optional royalties the previous week. By July of the following year, blockchain analytics platform Nansen reported that effective creator royalty fees fell to 0.6% in July 2023 from an average of 2.5% in 2022, attributing much of that gap to Blur’s growth, its minimum royalty policy and OpenSea lowering its own royalty requirements to compete. Blur didn’t disclose why it made the decision to shutter its frontend and wind down new lending activity on Blend. Related: Magic Eden scare puts 3,