Blur

Blur is a website and set of smart contracts for buying, selling, bidding on and borrowing against NFTs. Its homepage pitches it at professional traders: it sweeps listings across several marketplaces at once, shows portfolio analytics and tracks collection activity in real time.

Two organizations sit behind the brand. The blur.io site and interface are offered by Non Fungible Trading Ltd., which the Terms of Service place in Road Town, Tortola, British Virgin Islands, with disputes going to individual arbitration under BVI law. The Blur Foundation, a separate body, runs the governance forum and documentation and says its job is to help the community govern the Blur protocol; its own website terms are governed by Panamanian law. Blur does not publish the names of its founders or its staff. The homepage lists backers including Paradigm, 6529 and Keyboard Monkey, and Paradigm's 2023 Blend paper credits a contributor called Pacman among its authors.

BLUR, the token, controls the DAO. The Foundation's tokenomics page gives a fixed 3 billion supply split 51% to the community, 29% to past and future core contributors, 19% to investors and 1% to advisors, with four-year vesting for insiders. As of October 2026 CoinGecko shows about 2.92 billion BLUR circulating and a market capitalization near $23 million.

Blur works like an order book for NFTs. Sellers list items, and buyers either take listings or place bids. Collection-wide bids are funded from Blur's Bid Pool contract: a trader deposits ETH once and can spread it across many bids without locking ETH per bid. The app says bids are free to place, that pool balances can be withdrawn at any time, and that the bid-pool contracts were audited by Code4rena. As of October 2026 DefiLlama counts about $13.9 million sitting in those pools across Ethereum and Blast.

Blend, launched in May 2023 and designed with Paradigm, is Blur's lending protocol. Lenders sign offers off-chain, and a borrower who accepts one locks the NFT in a vault and receives ETH. Loans have no fixed end date and no price oracle. A lender who wants out starts a Dutch auction in which the interest rate climbs from zero until a new lender takes over; if nobody does before the maximum rate, the borrower is liquidated and the lender can claim the NFT. Blend also powers buy-now-pay-later purchases. DefiLlama shows about $2.8 million in active Blend loans as of October 2026.

Blur's points and token rewards have been paid in seasons for listing and bidding. The homepage says 700 million BLUR went to the community in Seasons 1 and 2, and that Season 3 runs on Blast, an Ethereum layer-two network. A November 2024 forum proposal says Season 4 was funded with BLAST tokens from the Blast Foundation.

Blur charges no marketplace fee. You still pay Ethereum gas on every on-chain action and any creator royalty that applies to the collection. Blur's governance documentation says token holders may switch on a protocol fee of up to 2.5% on marketplace trades, and set lender and borrower fees on Blend. As of October 2026 neither fee is in force.

Royalties are where Blur's policy is easiest to misread. Blur's 2022 Terms leave royalty payment to the protocols and creators. The November 2024 BIP-1 proposal, written by community member SplitCapital, described Blur as charging no fee while enforcing 0.5% minimum creator royalties, and proposed replacing that with a 0.5% protocol fee paid to token lockers. The forum thread records discussion but no vote. Blur's app code also shows that collections whose creators block other marketplaces get full royalties enforced on Blur. Check the royalty shown at checkout for the specific collection before you trade. For how this compares with other venues, see how Blur compares with other NFT marketplaces.

Blur does not ask for an account or identity documents; you connect an Ethereum wallet. The Terms require users to be at least 18, to not be located in a country under a US government embargo, and to not appear on a US government list of sanctioned or restricted parties. They also bar using a VPN to get around those limits and reserve the right to block access from any location or device. Blur does not publish a country-by-country list.

Blur's Terms say Non Fungible Trading does not take custody of any NFT and does not act as an agent or custodian for users. NFTs stay in your wallet until a trade settles. Two exceptions matter in practice. ETH you deposit into the bid pool sits in Blur's Bid Pool contract until you withdraw it. An NFT pledged to a Blend loan sits in a vault until the loan is repaid or liquidated.

The core contracts are published by the Foundation: the Blur Exchange proxy and Exchange V2 proxy, the aggregator, the Bid Pool and the Blend lending contract. Several are proxies, which means their logic can be upgraded. Under the governance framework a Marketplace Committee handles upgrades to the marketplace, aggregator and lending contracts and policy decisions such as royalties, while BLUR holders vote through Snapshot and then on-chain through Tally, with a 120 million BLUR quorum and a two-day execution delay. The documentation says committee powers are meant to move to governance over time but does not name committee members or multisig signers.

Code4rena ran two public audit contests in 2022. The October 2022 contest on the Blur Exchange found one high-severity and one medium-severity issue; Blur said the contract with the high finding would not be deployed. The November 2022 contest, sponsored under the Non Fungible Trading name and covering the exchange and pool contracts, found one high and four medium issues. We found no audit report for Blend in the sources checked, and no public bug bounty page.

We found no exploit of Blur's own contracts in DefiLlama's hacks database as of October 2026. An unrelated BNB Chain project called Blur Finance appears there as a 2022 rug pull; it is not connected to blur.io.

The risks are those of an active trading venue rather than of a custodian. NFT floor prices move fast, and bids filled during a sell-off can leave you holding items worth less than you paid. Blend borrowers face liquidation if no lender will refinance, and lenders can end up owning an NFT instead of getting ETH back. Token rewards have shaped trading on Blur, so volumes and floor support can thin out when incentives fall. Governance could also turn on fees of up to 2.5%.

Wallet hygiene matters too. Listing or bidding requires approving Blur's contracts to move your tokens, so it is worth reviewing approvals regularly; our guide to token approvals covers how.

To start, connect a self-custody Ethereum wallet at blur.io and sign the login message. To bid, deposit ETH into the bid pool, then place collection or trait bids; to sell, list from your portfolio or accept a standing bid. To leave, cancel open bids and listings, withdraw your bid-pool balance back to your wallet, and repay any Blend loan to release the NFT from its vault. Unwithdrawn pool ETH stays in the contract until you pull it out.

Blur does not run a public help center. Its homepage links to the official X account (@blur_io) and the Discord server, and the Foundation runs a forum at gov.blur.foundation and posts as @blurfoundation on X. API access is by request through a form on the homepage. Scammers impersonate NFT marketplaces in Discord DMs and fake airdrop pages; the only claim site Blur's Foundation links to is hold.blur.foundation.

Blur's main milestones, as documented in its own and its auditors' sources:

• June 2022: Terms of Service published by Non Fungible Trading Ltd.
• October and November 2022: Code4rena audit contests on the exchange and pool contracts.
• October 2022 to February 2023: eligibility window for the immediate BLUR claim.
• 14 February 2023: BLUR token launch, per DefiLlama's protocol timeline.
• 1 May 2023: Blend lending protocol published with Paradigm.
• November 2023: Blur Foundation website terms updated.
• November 2024: BIP-1 fee-switch proposal posted on the governance forum; no vote recorded.