On November 21st, Blast, a Layer 2 network based on Optimistic Rollup, announced the completion of a $20 million financing round. The round was led by Paradigm, Standard Crypto, eGirl Capital, and Mechanism Capital, with participation from several angel investors including Andrew Kang, co-founder of Lido, Hasu, strategic advisor at Lido, and Larry Cermak, CEO of The Block.

It is worth noting that Blast was founded by Pacman, the founder of Blur. Paradigm and eGirl Capital were also the lead investors and participating investors in Blur's seed round in March 2022.

According to the team, Blast's positioning is "the only L2 on Ethereum with Ethereum and stablecoin native yield", and they believe that this advantage alone can help Blast attract over $20 billion TVL. (Although the total TVL of Ethereum Layer 2 is currently only $13.87 billion.)

Pacman believes that the two biggest opportunities in the current NFT field are reducing transaction costs and institutional-level NFT perpetual rights. The gas spent on NFT transactions has reached hundreds of millions of dollars, and the current market for perpetual contract trading is six times that of spot trading. These opportunities require the emergence of a Layer 2.

"Unique" Native Revenue Mechanism

Blast believes that the current benchmark interest rate for Layer 2 is 0%. In default conditions, the value of a user's assets will depreciate over time. However, on Blast, a user's balance will automatically compound and earn additional Blast rewards.

Specifically, Blast natively participates in ETH staking, and the staking rewards will be returned to Layer 2 users and dapps. If a user has 1 ETH in their Blast wallet, over time it will automatically grow to 1.04, 1.08, 1.12 ETH.

Moreover, not only ETH on Blast can generate profits, but stablecoins as well. When users bridge stablecoins such as USDC, USDT, and DAI to Blast, they will be deposited into on-chain treasury protocols like MakerDAO, and the profits will be returned to Blast users through Blast's automated basic stablecoin USDB.

The Blast early access program is now live and invitation-only. All participants will receive Blast point rewards.

Blast's interactive interface

Currently, Blast supports four languages in its early access stage: English, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. For Chinese users, the experience is still quite user-friendly.

Although Blast has completed the infrastructure construction, the development of dapps is still in its early stages. The only way to participate in the ecosystem is to "bridge funds in". Bridging funds within 7 days will earn double points, but withdrawing funds will not be available until the mainnet is launched in February next year. The launch of dapps will also have to wait until after the mainnet is launched (perhaps during the testnet).

For this reason, Blast has also launched an airdrop reward program specifically for developers, with 50% of the airdrop being allocated to developers.

Therefore, currently, user participation in Blast will remain in the simple stage of "recruiting people to earn points and participate in airdrops".

How is the community responding?

According to Pacman's vision, Blast will support all types of Dapps in the future, such as DEX, NFTFi, SocialFi, and other application scenarios. This design concept has sparked discussions in the community. 0xLoki, a researcher at Huobi Incubator, believes that staking assets for profit on public chains is not a new concept, but Blast's emergence can avoid "middlemen profiting from price differences".

The founder of NFT project Weirdo Ghost Gang, sleepy.mid, said, "The most unique thing about Blast and other Layer2 coins is that they can provide native revenue for ETH and stablecoins. Blast impressed me a lot."

However, there are also different opinions. Liu Feng, the editor-in-chief of Front Chain News, said that "Blast and Blur have the same taste of pyramid schemes." The opening of "points system + invitation code + transparent airdrop" seems to be a common marketing tactic of the investment party paradigm.

There are also people who do not buy into the idea of Blast. Investor brain genius believes that Paradigm gamifies features that the community does not need, and people only participate for the sake of airdrops.

In addition, the birth of Blast was due to the investors' demand for returns on Blur. Earlier today, Blur announced the opening of the second season airdrop application and the start of the third season airdrop, which will last for six months. Pacman, the founder, stated that Blast is providing momentum for Blur's third season airdrop, and the "automatic interest" strategy will undoubtedly bring more users and liquidity to Blur.

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