The NFT market after Blur: what the data says about who is still buying
Monthly NFT sales are down 70% in a year and blue-chip floors sit far below their peaks. Yet buyers have not vanished. They have moved to different products.
NFTANALYSIS
Sofia Marchetti
10/28/20263 min read
When Blur announced that its marketplace website would go dark on November 12, it read like an obituary for the speculative NFT trading boom that the platform had helped create. The numbers behind the decision are stark. According to CoinDesk, Blur's monthly volume peaked at about $1.43 billion in March 2023, when it handled more than 70% of Ethereum NFT trading, and had fallen below $7 million by March 2026. But a closer look at the wider market in October 2026 shows something more nuanced than a sector in terminal decline. The money that remains is concentrated in different places, bought by different people, for different reasons.
The size of the market today
CryptoSlam data, as reported by Decrypt, puts global NFT sales at about $167.2 million in September 2026. That is down roughly 70% from $554.8 million a year earlier and more than 90% below the December 2023 peak of about $1.78 billion. Weekly sales in mid-October hovered between roughly $40 million and $47 million.
The marketplace layer has shrunk accordingly. DefiLlama figures show OpenSea collected about $25.1 million in fees in 2025, compared with roughly $1.55 billion in 2022. A survey of 56 early NFT marketplaces compiled by CryptoDiffer found that only 21 still operate, with closures this year including Nifty Gateway, Foundation and Binance NFT. OpenSea itself has been generating more volume from fungible tokens than from NFTs for months, and in March it postponed the launch of its SEA token, citing difficult market conditions.
Blue-chip collections have not escaped. According to CoinGecko data from mid-October, the CryptoPunks floor of about 31 ETH sits roughly 75% below its 2021 high, while Bored Ape Yacht Club is down about 97% from its peak and Pudgy Penguins about 94%. Many once-prominent collections now trade below the price of a mid-range laptop.
Where buyers actually are
The most revealing data point is not the total but the composition. In the seven days to October 17, CryptoSlam recorded about $47.1 million in sales and more than 107,000 buyer addresses, up sharply from the prior week. The single largest collection by sales was Courtyard on Polygon, with roughly $7.7 million and more than 18,000 buyers.
Courtyard is not a profile-picture project. It tokenizes graded physical collectibles, mostly Pokémon and sports cards stored in a vault, and lets owners trade them on-chain or redeem the physical item. Its buyers are card collectors who want fast settlement and verifiable ownership, not traders chasing token rewards. That a vault-backed card marketplace now regularly outsells CryptoPunks says a lot about where demand for NFTs has migrated.
Bitcoin is another source of activity. Ordinals and BRC-20 related collections pushed Bitcoin's weekly NFT sales to about $8.25 million in the same period, roughly level with Polygon. Gaming assets add a steady base: Immutable recorded about $2.55 million in weekly sales, led by Guild of Guardians heroes. And new venues are appearing. DefiLlama data shows Robinhood Chain recorded about $21.5 million in NFT volume in September, only months after its mainnet launch.
What the data does not show
Two caveats apply. First, buyer and seller counts are wallet addresses, not people, and one active trader can control many wallets. Second, single large trades can distort weekly rankings: one BRC-20 related transaction worth almost $3 million placed second in CryptoSlam's list for the week to October 17. Small markets are easy to move, which makes week-to-week swings a poor guide to trend.
It is also worth separating the decline of trading from the decline of use. Many NFTs function today as tickets, game items, membership passes or receipts for physical goods. Those uses generate fewer headlines and less volume than speculative flipping, but they do not depend on a marketplace like Blur to exist.
Three signals to watch
The first is the share of sales linked to real-world assets. If tokenized collectibles keep growing while profile-picture trading shrinks, the NFT market will increasingly resemble a settlement layer for physical goods rather than an art and status market. The second is marketplace economics. OpenSea's fee revenue and the eventual fate of its token will show whether a general NFT marketplace can still run as a standalone business. The third is new distribution: retail-focused chains such as Robinhood Chain could bring a different audience to on-chain collectibles if the early activity proves durable.
The Blur shutdown marks the end of a model built on incentives, zero fees and professional traders. The data from October suggests that the NFT market is not disappearing so much as shrinking back to the buyers who wanted the underlying items in the first place.