Blast Storm: TVL's Explosion of Secrets and Controversies

dt X DeFi_Cheetah，DODO Research****

With the delivery of the second phase of Blur’s airdrop rewards, the introduction of Blast, an L2 public chain also developed by the Blur team, was announced, and the announcement has exceeded $600M in just nine days, approaching the TVL of Solana’s entire chain (662M).

Blast Introduction

Blast’s goal is to create the only L2 public chain with native yields from Ethereum and stablecoins, although the whitepaper and technical details have not yet been announced, but users are allowed to deposit funds into their mainnet contracts and start earning LSD & RWA yields, as well as start points activities.

Blast’s ability to obtain such a high amount of lock-up in a short period of time is all due to its strong team and investor background, which was built by the Blur team led by Blur founder Pacman, and received investment from the famous VC Paradigm, eGirls Capital, as well as the famous CT DegenSpartan, Andrew Kang and others.

Blast Token Airdrop

In addition to the strong background of the team, the airdrop expectation is another key point of its TVL rapid growth, Blast started the airdrop points event before its L2 mainnet was launched, which is reminiscent of the team’s Blur once issued the fifth largest airdrop in Ethereum history, which is also an early point event in exchange for airdrops, which made many people rich.

In addition to the Blast airdrop rules are related to the size of the deposited funds, they also bring in an invitation system, the funds deposited by the invitee will be able to affect the points of the original inviter, the more people invited, the larger the funds invited in, the higher the airdrop points, and whether or not Blur has been used is also another factor in calculating the points, the address that has received higher Blur points will be able to get higher Blast airdrop points, so as to reward the early users of the support team, and it is also important to pay special attention to According to the current roadmap, the deposited funds will not be withdrawn until February 24, 2024, when the mainnet is launched, and the airdrop points will be exchanged on May 24, which means that there will be a three-month lock-up period and an airdrop will be issued after half a year.

Blast Controversy

At the same time, some people believe that although Blast is only a deposit contract in the name of L2 public chain, it is just a person to help you deposit money into Lido / MakerDAO, which is not called L2 at all, and questioned that Blast 600M funds are only managed through multi-signature, and the contract allows for upgrades and no time lock mechanism, which will be a big concern in terms of security, which will be a big concern for Blast The team responded that L2 such as Arbitrum, Optimism & Polygon also use the multisig model, and their multisig custodians are all senior engineers with experience in the development of high-risk applications such as financial applications and smart contracts, and promised to update the multisig hardware wallet in the coming week.

In addition, Paradigm team members, who are its important investors, also posted that they do not agree with Last’s move to allow users to deposit and not withdraw for three months before the launch of the mainnet, and believe that its invitation link marketing campaign will reduce the team’s work efficiency, Paradigm believes that Blast will set a bad precedent for other projects, but although there are conflicting ideas, they choose not to interfere with the operation of the founder Pacman, and will continue to support Pacman and their team, and said that they are world-class developers who can bring value to the industry.

Blast’s deposit of funds into LIDO / MakerDAO has also caused a lot of discussion, Lido has been constantly criticized by the community for its large scale, resulting in Ethereum being too centralized, and Blast wants to deposit a large amount of TVL into Lido, which will only make Ethereum more centralized, and Lido’s security risk will become an unexploded bomb in the Defi world and even the entire currency circle, and in the same way, depositing a large amount of stablecoin funds into MakerDAO will lead to the entire Defi The world’s dependence on top applications is too high, and the overall market’s ability to resist risks will be lower.

Author’s Opinion

@DeFi_Cheetah

I’ve been reading tweets that are optimistic about Blast, and it seems to me okay as a speculative play, but it’s not my focus on investing. Because I think Blast has the risk of relying on MakerDAO and LidoFinance by converting user deposits to earn yields, which sounds more efficient in terms of short-term speculation, but in the long run, this kind of direction leading to centralization should not be the mainstream of Ethereum, but should incentivize the development of decentralized LSDs such as fraxfinance’s $frxETH v2 and RocketPool.

At the same time, with the convergence of L2 public chains, especially after EIP-4844 reduces costs, economies of scale will be more obvious, and the larger the scale, the more able to occupy the leading position, so I don’t think it is much attractive to have native benefits, and the currently dominant Arbitrum and Optimism will be able to easily follow up, of course, the current news disclosed by Blast is limited, and I will study further if there is more news.

@19971122 DT

In the author’s opinion, Paradigm has always been one of the VCs who know the most about the currency circle, and the products it launches may not always be particularly innovative in technology, but they can always provoke market reactions in terms of token mechanism, and I still remember the popular Social Fi product FriendTech a few months ago, at the beginning of the project, only the most Degen group of players used it, but with Paradigm announcing the investment and bringing the points mechanism to completely arouse the sentiment of Fomo in the market, all kinds of tutorials on points are flying all over the sky.

And Blast is also the same, with Ethereum and stablecoin native income of the public chain Gnosis Chain or Canto are in progress, its concept is not particularly innovative, what really arouses market sentiment is the matter of Lu points, Blast directly will not be issued at present all the L2 public chain that has not yet issued coins dare not say but silently do things, clearly tell everyone I just want you to provide TVL, how much TVL can be exchanged for how many points are clearly told to you.