Blast, the new L2 network launched by Blur founder Pacman, has exceeded $27 million in TVL shortly after its launch. NFT giant Christian has deposited 500 stETH in Blast, with high hopes for its performance. Even more surprising is that just today, Blast announced the completion of $20 million in financing, including Paradigm, Standard Crypto, eGirl Capital, Mechanism Capital co-founder Andrew Kang, Lido consultant Hasu, The Block CEO Larry Cermak and others have participated in the investment.
What does $20 million mean? Arbitrum's first round of financing in 2019 was $3.7 million, and Op's first round of financing in 2020 was only $3.5 million. Blast's first round of financing was tens of millions of dollars. At the same time, the bridge gameplay launched by Blast also caused a wave of discussion on social media platforms. Some KOLs even said that Blur's move was a gift of money, interest, and gas.
Next, veDAO Research Institute will bring you an introduction to Blast and an explanation of how to play it.
What is Blast?
First of all, we need to understand a concept: Risk Free Rate (RFR). This concept holds that the cryptocurrency world is also inflationary. ETH has a stable staking yield of 3%-4%, but most of the funds in Layer 2 accounts are just statically placed (yield 0%), which means that these assets are being passively depreciated due to ETH's inflation.
This is the problem that Blast hopes to solve, providing the possibility of passive interest earning for funds in Layer 2 accounts.
Specifically, when a user deposits funds into Blast, Blast will immediately use the corresponding ETH locked on the Layer 1 network for network native staking, and automatically return the ETH staking income obtained to the users on Blast. In short, if a user holds 1 ETH in an account on Blast, it may automatically grow to 1.1 or 1.2 ETH over time.
In addition to ETH, which can participate in native staking, Blast also supports the passive interest of 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's native stablecoin).
After users enter the Blast network through advance access, they can not only immediately enjoy 4% of ETH or 5% of stablecoin passive interest, but also accumulate Blast Points rewards. At present, the official description of points only revealed that Blast plans to launch the main network and develop withdrawals on February 24 next year, and open the "redemption" of Blast Points on May 24.
Specific operation process:
1. The user logs in to the Blast official website and links the wallet.
2. The user enters the invitation code. Currently, KOLs related to platform X are publishing their own invitation codes.
3. After entering the invitation code, users can check whether they have received the airdrop by linking the relevant X account and Discord account.
4. It doesn’t matter if you don’t get the airdrop. Users can still use the bridging function. It is worth noting that within 7 days starting from today, you will get double points (Blast Points) for any amount of bridging. The more the amount, the more points you get.
5. When the user completes the bridging behavior, he/she will get a new invitation code. Users can also get corresponding points rewards by distributing invitation codes. The specific rules are as follows:
In general, the gameplay of Blast can be understood as forming a team with others, locking at least 5 ETH together, and unlocking the principal and interest together in February next year. It is somewhat similar to the early ETH2.0 3 ETH staking activity.
With the popularity of BlackRock Ethereum ETF and the upcoming Cancun upgrade, ETH may see a wave of growth next year. By staking Blast, you can passively obtain the income from ETH and the profit from bridging, killing two birds with one stone.
