Good news! Blast will be available for trading on June 26th!
Let’s take a look at Blast again!
Project Introduction
Blast is a Layer2 that can provide passive interest for funds in Layer2 accounts, which is very attractive to many idle funds on Layer2. In the crypto market, cryptocurrencies can be divided into two categories based on the token model. One is the deflationary cryptocurrency represented by Bitcoin, whose token quantity has a fixed upper limit and no additional issuance; the other is the inflationary cryptocurrency represented by Ethereum, whose total amount is increased at a fixed rate every year, which makes ETH have a stable staking yield of 3%-4%, and Blast's interest income comes from this.
Specifically, when users deposit funds into Blast, Blast will immediately use the corresponding ETH locked on the Layer 1 network for network native staking (currently mainly on Lido), and automatically return the ETH staking income obtained to users on Blast. In addition to ETH that can participate in native staking, Blast also supports passive interest on stablecoins. The specific operating mechanism is that when users bridge stablecoins (such as USDC, USDT, and DAI) to Blast, Blast will immediately deposit the corresponding stablecoins locked on the Layer 1 network into US debt DeFi protocols such as MakerDAO, and automatically return the income to users on Blast in the form of USDB (Blast native stablecoin). According to Pacman, Blast's vision is not just to serve Blur, but to support all types of Dapps, such as DEX, lending, derivatives trading, NFTFi, and even SocialFi.
Founder background and financing details
Founder: Tieshun Roquerre
2014 - Moved from Boston to San Francisco to work full-time as an engineer at Teespring instead of my junior year of high school.
2015 - Dropped out of high school and started StrongIntro.
2016 - Participated in the Y Combinator incubator program to advance their project "StrongIntro".
2016 - Started undergraduate studies at MIT, studying mathematics and computer science.
2018 - Drops out of MIT and starts Namebase.
2020 - Raised $5 million for Namebase.
2021 - Sold Namebase to Namecheap.
Tieshun is a founder who knows marketing very well. He is only 25 years old, but he has been an Internet entrepreneur for 10 years. In his blog, there is an article titled "How Douyin started the flywheel (https://tieshunroquerre.com/blog/douyin)". After reading it, it is not difficult to understand why he was able to suddenly create BLAST.
It’s worth mentioning here that these investors are actually investors of Blur.
Investment institutions: Paradigm (https://www.paradigm.xyz/portfolio), uniswap, opensea, optimism, maker, etc.
Investment institutions: StandardCrypto (https://www.standardcrypto.vc/portfolio/), AAVE, LIDO, opensea, etc.
The projects invested by these two institutions basically cover the early blockchain king-level projects. Their endorsement allowed BLAST to break through the TVL of hundreds of millions of US dollars in the first week.
Financing details:
Blast completes $20 million financing: This round of financing was jointly initiated by Paradigm, Standard Crypto, eGirl Capital, and Mechanism Capital; Lido co-founder Andrew Kang, Blur strategic advisor Hasu, The Block CEO Larry Cermak and many other angel investors participated. It can be seen that this project has received investment from many well-known VC institutions and has also attracted the attention of project founders in the cryptocurrency circle.
Model innovation
Blast uses a similar second-layer technology solution to OP and ARB, namely Optimistic Rollup. The purpose of choosing the OP system is to achieve rapid implementation and enrich the ecosystem. However, Blast does not have much innovation in terms of technology, and its real highlight lies in model innovation. At the current stage of the industry, model innovation is an innovation that deserves attention.
The future of layer 2 or Ethereum’s role in the industry usually takes 10 to 20 years, because the concept of technology needs to go through such a cycle to be implemented. During this cycle, the degree of innovation of the model has a very important influence on user data and capital effect.
Taking the current situation as an example, we cannot use layer2 directly. Although starknet and zksync provide a certain interactive experience, their usage experience is not ideal. In contrast, arb and op perform slightly better and can currently be used for transfers. But we must admit that if it were not for the huge airdrop expectations of layer2 or the money-making effect similar to BASE before, almost no one would choose to use layer2.
Even during the airdrop period, when the airdrop ends, the transaction volume, number of active addresses and TVL of layer2 will drop drastically, which is an inevitable trend. However, the emergence of Blast has brought significant changes to layer2. It provides interest-bearing income from staking, which is the core competitiveness of Blast.
When users stake tokens into Blast, they will be placed in other staking protocols depending on the type of token. For example, if you deposit DAI, Blast will place it in Maker DAO, and if you deposit ETH, it will be placed in Lido. Ultimately, the proceeds are settled in Blast's native stablecoin USDB and passed back to the user.
The services provided by Blast are similar to those of the early YFI, which focused on the DeFi aggregation income period. Blast has evolved into a layer2 aggregator, providing users with a wider range of stable income channels and convenient operations, avoiding complex operations between various DAPPS.
However, a stable 3 to 5 points of return is not very meaningful for retail investors. Therefore, Blast has also specially proposed the "BlastPoint" reward mechanism. Specifically, after depositing funds into Blast, users will receive an invitation code that can be used to invite new users. If a new user deposits assets, the inviter will receive points, and the inviter will also receive additional points after the new user recommends it. In the end, based on the points and the level of the pledged assets, users will have the opportunity to receive Blast's airdrop income.
Now the most important question is, how much airdrop rewards can Blast give? According to the airdrop rules of Blur in the past, two Twitter users received million-level airdrops in February this year, calculated based on the median price of Blur of 0.75U. In addition, among the 80.15% who received rewards, 35.8% received rewards of 75U to 750U; 39.6% received rewards of 750U to 7500U, and 7.8% received rewards of 7500U to 75000U. This shows that even if the rewards are ranked according to the points, 40% of people can get rewards of several thousand dollars, and even simple staking will have rewards of hundreds of dollars. These are already huge airdrop amounts.
Why is Blast so popular?
Blast is unique in that it provides native yields on ETH and stablecoins, a feature not available in other Layer2 solutions. When users transfer ETH to other Layer2s, these Layer2s will only lock ETH into smart contracts and map the corresponding Layer2 ETH; Blast will deposit the user's ETH into Lido to earn interest, and introduce a new interest-earning stablecoin USDB (which will earn income by purchasing U.S. Treasury bonds through MakerDAO) to the Blast network.
In addition, as a Layer2 launched by the Blur team, it has its own traffic. Previously, Blur distributed more than $200 million in airdrops to users on its platform, and it already has a broad community base. In addition, Blast is currently conducting airdrop incentives, and attracting users to participate in Blast staking through traffic fission marketing methods.
Blast’s Dapp’s total locked value has exceeded $2 billion, making it the sixth largest on-chain economy in the world.
Impact of Blast on L2
"If you are already deployed on the mainnet or any L2, you can easily deploy on Blast."
This means it is perfectly adapted to EVM and other development tools should be compatible.
This is a comparison between Blast and other L2s provided by the official website.
1. Blast’s liquidity will attract the liquidity of other layer 2 projects in the market to its own projects, which will stimulate the VCs behind them and also stimulate a wave of tokens.
2. Blast will expose the projects that are trying to take advantage of the situation on layer 2, which is equivalent to clearing the market.
3. Blast achieves the goal of layer2 bringing its own income and solves the problem of no benchmark interest rate for funds deposited on other Layer2 chains.
Summarize
The significance of blockchain is to solve the problem of information opacity in social consensus/democratic governance. When advocating the supremacy of technology, we must admit that social consensus itself is more important than technology, because it is the basis for the effective operation of all Web3 projects. In the final analysis, technology serves social consensus. From the perspective of financial design, Blast is clearly innovative and can solve the interest-free risk faced by crypto assets on Layer2, which is also the reason for the influx of a large amount of funds.
