Written by: Jessy
The Blast airdrop for multiple PUA users has finally ended. The airdrop cannot satisfy everyone. This time, the Blast airdrop is sunny. Anyone who participates in the interaction can basically get the airdrop, which is equivalent to zero-cost, but the money is really small, even less than 1U. The big users who received the most airdrops have about 23 billion points, which can get about 50 million tokens. According to the initial issue price of $0.03, it is about $1.5 million.
The community has also criticized this sunny airdrop method, especially its "killing big players" behavior, which has caused strong dissatisfaction among big players. X user @Christianeth said that he deposited 50 million US dollars on Blast, but only received 100,000 US dollars in airdrops. Others complained that Blast's points were seriously inflated.
Including Blast, Ethereum Layer2 projects that have airdropped in recent months have been more or less criticized by the profiteers. The reason for the curse is simple: they did not achieve the returns they expected. Indeed, the era of ARB is unlikely to reappear in the Ethereum ecosystem.
The completion of Blast’s airdrop also marks the change of the airdrop era. After the token is issued, we should pay more attention to the development of Blast itself. Is the founder Tieshun really a liar as everyone says? Is Blast really just a Ponzi scheme?
The airdrop problem is actually not a big deal
In this round of airdrops, 17% (17 billion) of the total BLAST will be distributed to users. The 17% consists of: 7% Blast Points, 7% Blast Gold Points, and 3% Blur Foundation.
The specific details are as follows:
1. Blast Points: 7,000,000,000 (7%). Users who connect ETH or USDB to Blast bootstrap the initial liquidity of the Blast ecosystem and earn Blast Points in Phase 1. These users will be rewarded with 7% of the total BLAST supply.
2. Blast Gold Points: 7,000,000,000 (7%). Users who contribute to the success of the Dapp will receive Blast Gold Points and will be rewarded with 7% of the total BLAST supply.
3. Vesting: The top 0.1% of users (approximately 1,000 wallets) will vest part of the airdrop linearly over 6 months. Based on the first phase of activities, vesting requires reaching the monthly points threshold.
4. Blur Foundation: 3,000,000,000 (3%). The Blur Foundation will receive 3% of the total BLAST supply to be distributed to the Blur community for retroactive and future airdrops.
Currently, the top few personal airdrops are as follows:
From the above ranking, we can also see that the real big score holders can actually obtain more tokens and rewards, although the behavior of killing big score holders also exists. For example, user X @Christianeth said that he deposited 50 million US dollars on Blast and only received an airdrop of 100,000 US dollars.
Since the launch of the Blast mainnet in March, there have been many criticisms about the Blast airdrop. When the Blast mainnet was launched, users who had staked Ethereum on the testnet found that they needed to transfer their assets and points earned from staking to the mainnet by themselves. To do this, they needed to burn a large amount of Gas, which even exceeded 50U at the highest point. Blast was also questioned for its low contract security. Before the mainnet was launched, it was just a smart contract. The contract stated that after the user's money was deposited, it would be deposited into a multi-signature wallet, and after the money was received, it would be deposited into Lido to start financial management.
However, these innocuous problems did not stop Blast from developing. This year, the airdrop finally landed. And it was thanks to the airdrop method that Blast’s marketing was successful.
The biggest difference between Blast and previous Layer2 airdrop methods is that it provides a platform for staking and earning interest. Users deposit mainstream assets into Blast, not only with the expectation of airdrops, but also put the assets deposited by users on the Blast chain into platforms such as LDO to stake and earn interest.
When users stake tokens into Blast, they will be involved in other staking protocols according to the type of tokens. For example, if you deposit DAI, Blast will put it in MakerDAO, and if you deposit ETH, it will be put in Lido. Blast's native stablecoin USDB will settle the income and pass it back to the user.
Blast uses the most straightforward airdrop incentive to attract users and increase the amount of locked positions. The airdrop incentive method is a simple and crude "three-tiered pyramid scheme model", which has been proven to be effective many times. Currently, Blast's TVL ranks third in Ethereum Layer2, after ARB and Base.
From this point of view, this influence is undoubtedly very effective. Although Blast has been criticized by the coin collectors, airdrops are a win-win situation. Not only Blast’s airdrops, from the airdrops in recent months, the coin collectors should recognize that the era of zero-cost or low-cost coin collection through a large number of accounts is over in the short term. Now it depends on the amount of funds and the depth of participation.
Stake Layer2 on the surface, but want to build a full-stack chain
Blast positions itself as a new "Stake Layer2" narrative that is different from other Layer2s, but in fact it is just Ethereum staking mining and contract mining through Blast users. This is the same as users depositing money into platforms such as Lido, but because the money is deposited through Blast as an intermediary, they can earn airdrop points.
In addition to using airdrop marketing to create ultra-high TVL, Blast's technical implementation itself is also innovative in Ethereum Layer2.
While many technical teams are constantly optimizing their own chains, Tieshun is actually using OP Stack to quickly build the Blast chain, and then deploying a full-stack chain on this basis. The Blast Foundation announced that it will do this in the second phase, and said it will work with the community to develop desktop and mobile wallets designed for crypto-native users, aiming to provide a better experience than Metamask and accelerate user adoption through incentives. It can be seen that Blast is not satisfied with just being an L2 public chain, but hopes to be a full-stack chain that can be fully integrated from chain to wallet to cex.
One commonality among the current public chains is that they all have similar end-to-end user experiences. Each chain focuses on optimizing the chain's technology itself while relying on third parties to complete the rest of the stack. This approach is actually similar to Android, where they optimize the operating system and rely on third parties to do the rest.
The Android approach has worked for public chains so far, but it has also led to a fragmented and friction-filled ecosystem.
Unlike Android, Apple took a full stack approach. They built everything from software to hardware. And optimized across the entire stack. This approach greatly accelerated the evolution to mobile and formed the most valuable mobile ecosystem in the world.
It seems that what Blast wants to do next is what Apple is doing.
From this perspective, Tieshun is actually a very ambitious developer. Although the price of his NFT market project Blur has been falling, perhaps we can pay more attention to the innovation in the industry he is working in and whether it can actually be implemented.
