DeFi
Long-awaited BLAST token drops to $420 million market cap
Blast users can still earn points as part of its Phase 2 rewards campaign for the next four months.
The long-awaited airdrop of Blast, the popular but controversial Layer 2 network, is finally live.
The first phase of the Blast airdrop became eligible on June 26, and applications are expected to remain open for 30 days.
The airdrop distributed 17% of the total BLAST supply to early adopters. Blast Gold (developers) and Blast Points (users) holders were each awarded 7% of the tokens, with the remaining 3% being allocated as a reward to stakers on Bluer — the market-leading NFT marketplace also developed by the Blast team.
According to CoinGecko, BLAST debuted with a market capitalization of approximately $420 million, which equates to a fully diluted valuation of approximately $2.48 billion. The token recorded a modest decline of 3.6% in 20 minutes since its launch.
Blast released its tokenomics as part of the Q2 2024 project to summarize on June 25, revealing that half of BLAST’s 100 billion total supply is reserved for the Blast community.
Phase 2
Blast also announced that the second phase of its airdrop and launch campaigns is now live, with users able to earn “Phase 2 Rewards” for the next four months.
“Our mission is to unblock the banked”, Blast tweeted. “Our goal is to accelerate the market transition from an off-chain to an on-chain economy, which we believe is the most efficient market structure for global finance.”
Blast added that it plans to establish itself as a “full-stack chain” during phase 2.
“Unlike Android, Apple takes a full-stack approach,” Blast said said. “They build everything from software to hardware and optimize the entire stack. This approach has significantly accelerated the transition to mobile… The goal of the next phase of Blast, Phase 2, is to create the full stack chain.
Blast added that it would work with ecosystem projects to develop desktop and mobile wallet applications, seeking to deliver a level up to Metamask, a market-leading Web3 wallet provider.
Blast’s controversial debut
Blast had an explosive but controversial launch in November. The network quickly accumulated $500 million in deposits over five days, luring users with promises of future airdrops and native yield for ETH and stablecoin deposits.
Blast claims to have been the fastest growing channel among Layers 1 and 2. marking a total value locked (TVL) of $1 billion in just 13 days, and Blast native decentralized applications (dApps) enjoying a TVL of $2 billion after 100 days.
However, Blast also harvested critical as quickly as it attracted growth.
At “launch”, the project comprised nothing more than a one-way deposit contract secured by a multisig account controlled by anonymous developers, requiring depositors to have blind trust in the project so as not to run away with it. their assets.
“Blast is not an L2”, Jarrod Watts of Polygon tweetedat the time. “There is no testnet, no transactions, no bridge, no rollup, and no sending transaction data to Ethereum.”
Yields also came from converting users’ ETH to stETH to accumulate staking rewards and stablecoins to DAI to access the DAI savings rate, creating a dubious “native” yield mechanism.
Yet despite its controversial debut, Blast has since become the sixth largest channel by DeFi TVL with $2.38 billion after peaking at $3.28 billion on June 6, and ranks fourth among Layer 2s by the TVL network with $2.91 billion.
Blast users have also deposited an unusually high proportion of the network’s TVL into DeFi applications, with dApps hosting almost 82% of Blast’s network TVL.
For comparison, only 24% or $4.11 billion of Arbitrum’s $17.1 billion is deposited into dApps, while 22.7% of Base’s $7.49 billion and $12.3 % of OP Mainnet’s $6.45 billion is held in DeFi protocols.
Blast also ranked sixth among blockchains in terms of decentralized exchange volume, while its stablecoin USDB also ranked fourth in number of holders and fifth in 24-hour volume, according to Blast’s second quarter report.