Launched on Nov 21, the new Ethereum layer-2 solution Blast has surpassed $360 million in TVL, of which $313 million in ETH has been deposited into Lido, making it become the 3rd largest ETH staking holder in the market; $49 million in DAI has been deposited into MakerDAO; and the remaining $635,000 is in the protocol’s wallet, according to data from DeBank.
Crypto investors seem to have not stopped pouring money into this new project, despite being warned that their fund will be locked and cannot be withdrawn until Blast launched mainnet in Feb 2024.
Blast was founded by Blur founder Pacman and some former employees of MakerDAO, MIT and Seoul University graduates. On Nov 21, this Ethereum layer-2 announced it had raised $20 million from Paradigm, Standard Crypto and eGirl Capital.
Blast allows users to earn income automatically, while other L2s have no passive income; users bridge assets to other L2s and there is no additional income, while the ETH on Blast will automatically compound interest. Blast income comes from Ethereum staking and RWA protocols. The income from these decentralized protocols is automatically returned to Blast users. The current Ethereum rate of return is 4% and the stablecoin rate is 5%.
Blast has also a tiered invitation reward model. For example, A invites B, and B invites C. A can get 16% of B’s points and 8% of C’s points.
However, Simon Dedic, CEO of MoonRock Capital, stated that Blast’s unique selling point is its “Ponzi airdrop farming.”
Besides the ponzi-like scheme, Blast’s multi-sig wallet also caused a lot of controversy. Polygon developer Jarrod Watts pointed out that the five signer wallets of Blast’s multi-signature contract are all new addresses and their identities are unknown. He said that Blast is currently not layer-2 and has no testnet, transactions, bridges or transaction data sent to Ethereum. Blast is now just a multi-sig contract. To pay users after mainnet, they will need to reach 3/5 consensus, then deploy the fund to a new contract. However, this scenario depends a lot on” trust” and “rug pull” is possible.
According to its roadmap, Blast will launch testnet in Jan, mainnet in Feb 2024 and begin allowing withdrawals and then carry out airdrop based on Blast Point in May.