On November 21st, Blast officially launched its testnet for early access users. At the same time, they announced a successful fundraising round, raising $20 million from investors such as Paradigm, Standard Crypto, eGirl Capital, and several prominent individuals in the cryptocurrency community on the social media platform X.
Notably, within a few hours of the launch and the announcement of the fundraising amount, over $90 million in Ethereum (ETH) and stablecoins were bridged to Blast. Of this amount, more than $76 million in Ethereum was staked on Lido, earning an annual interest rate of 4%. Another $14 million was held in Maker DAO, with the remaining approximately 281,000 stored in wallets as ETH and stablecoin DAI.
However, achieving this $91 million figure took six months for Sui, one year for Aptos, and 15 days for Zksync, starting from the mainnet launch.
Blast is a layer2 project built on Optimistic Rollups technology, similar to Arbitrum and Optimism. Additionally, Blast is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), making it easy for investors and dApps on Ethereum to connect. The Blast development team includes founders of the NFT platform Blur, former MakerDAO employees, MIT graduates, and Seoul National University alumni.
Blast’s primary goal is to promote staking and yield generation on the Ethereum network. While Ethereum currently provides a basic interest rate of 3-4% through staking ETH, there hasn’t been any layer2 solution offering additional interest to incentivize holding ETH on it instead of layer1.
When users hold assets on Blast, their balances accumulate and generate interest. The ETH deposited into Blast is used to participate in ETH staking through Lido, and the block rewards are redistributed to users in the form of a stablecoin called USDB.
Blast’s operating model includes:
1. Deposit ETH or stablecoin to earn an annual interest rate of 4-5% and receive Blast points that can be converted into Airdrops.
2. A multi-tiered referral system that provides users with +16% Airdrop points from the first-tier referrals and +8% Airdrop points from the second-tier referrals.
Currently, Blast has a point accumulation mechanism for early access users, and there are two ways to earn points:
– Ref to Earn: Invite friends to join Blast (points are calculated based on the amount of deposits made by the invited individuals).
– Stake BLUR, ETH, or USDT on the platform to earn points.
**Please note**: Funds deposited into Blast cannot be withdrawn until February 2024 (the Blast mainnet launch date), and rewards will be distributed in May 2024.
In summary, Blast’s impressive achievements and the continuous flow of funds into this new player in the market reflect the market’s demand for layer2 protocols operating on layer1 platforms like Ethereum to address issues related to throughput, transaction speed, transaction costs, and scalability.