Yesterday, Blast, the latest project from Tieshun Roquerre, also known as Pacman and the founder of the successful Blur marketplace, went live. The launch attracted numerous investors, who promptly bridged over $30 million to the brand-new Ethereum L2 protocol. The project also secured funding of more than $20 million in a round led by influential supporters such as Paradigm and Standard Crypto.
Pacman, who acknowledged in a recent post on X, that he wished this L2 solution had existed before the Blur rollout, believes that Blast will meet the demands for native yield and broader application support more effectively than current L2 protocols.
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Some of the urgent issues affecting DApps identified by Pacman include the need for the reduction of transaction costs, which currently reach "hundreds of millions," and the absence of NFT perpetuals (NFT perps). Pacman asserts that "almost every on-chain DApp faces the problem of financial losses through depreciation." This challenge also affects Blur, which, according to Pacman, holds $100 million of Total Value Locked (TVL) in its pool that is not generating yield.
"I investigated L2s and realized there was a way to solve all these issues at once," Pacman explains, claiming that "A new L2 with native yield for DApps and users would allow the Blur ecosystem to avoid asset depreciation, reduce NFT transaction costs, and launch NFT perps." Pacman is confident that all DApps will benefit from his solution, which will serve not just as an execution environment but also as a liquidity environment.
"An L2 with native yield unlocks possibilities for the entire on-chain economy. Perps, dexes, lending, NFTs, and even SocialFi would benefit," Pacman adds.
There will be a close relationship between Blur and Blast, with the former deploying its L2 apps on Blast. In turn, Blast will reward the Blur community by improving yield possibilities. Presumably, as an L2 with native yield, Blast will allow for users’ balance to compound automatically and "earn Blast rewards on top."
"Specifically, Blast natively participates in ETH staking, and the staking yield is passed back to the L2’s users and dapps," Blast’s team explains claiming that it has redesigned "the L2 from the ground up." The protocol will also enable earning yield for stablecoins which will be "deposited in on-chain T-Bill protocols like MakerDAO, and the yield is passed back to Blast users via USDB, Blast’s auto-rebasing stablecoin."
According to Blast’s team, the community airdrop has already been live for early access. To earn airdrop points, which will be available for redemption, users should bridge to Blast or invite friends. However, participation in the Early Access airdrop itself required an invitation at the time of publication.
At the time of writing, the team planned to invite twenty random users who quote-tweeted the Blast’s thread, adding their own opinions about the advantages of Blast.
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The protocol’s developers will have the opportunity to participate in the dedicated developer airdrop scheduled for January, coinciding with the Blast Testnet release.
Withdrawals, along with the launch of DApps, are set to be enabled on February 24.
Amid the excitement surrounding the new opportunities presented by Pacman’s L2 protocol, enthusiastic supporters of Solana, which, unlike Blast, is an L1 blockchain network, highlighted its compression state feature introduced in April. According to earlier statements from the Solana Foundation tech lead Jon Wong, compressing an NFT allows users to pay between 2,400 and 24,000 times less for minting, making it possible to mint 1 million NFTs on the network for as little as $110.
The news about Blast resulted in a 25% spike in the price of BLUR, which was traded at $0.462694.
