Wu Blockchain Author | defioasis
Editor of this issue | Colin Wu
On November 21, while announcing the end of Blur S2 and the beginning of S3, Blur founder Pacman launched L2 Blast based on OP Rollup with its own ETH and stablecoin native yield, as well as the BLUR staking system, in which Blast is derived from Paradigm and It received $20 million in financing from investors including Standard Crypto. With the invitation mechanism and point system incentives representing branded airdrops, as of November 26, in less than 6 days, Blast has deposited more than $520 million in funds, including more than 220,000 ETH and Maker deposited in Lido There are over 64 million DAI in DSR. If compared with other L2, Blast has surpassed zkSync Era and become the fourth largest public chain.
However, strictly speaking, Blast cannot be called L2 at present. It should be regarded as an intermediary contract that is hosted and locked on behalf of others. It can only enter but not exit before the main network goes online. Its basic working principle is to receive the user's ETH or stable currency, pledge the ETH in Lido and convert the stable currency into DAI and pledge it in Maker.
Questions and responses
The doubts in the market mainly include two aspects, one is the contract security issue, and the other is the simple and crude model.
Regarding security issues, L2Beat pointed out that although the Blast contract (0x5f...a47d) is called LaunchBridge, it is not actually a Rollup Brdge, but a simple custody contract protected by a 3/5 multi-signature address; Blast does not yet have The L2 state root must be accompanied by a proof of validity or must have a fraud prevention mechanism. Polygon developer relations engineer Jarrod Watts further pointed out that the five signers of the Blast multi-signature contract are all new addresses and their identities are unknown; Blast is not L2 and has no testnet, transactions, bridges, rollbacks, and transaction data sent to Ethereum; And the contract authorizes any "mainnetBridge" contract to spend the maximum possible amount of its Lido and DAI. SlowMist founder Yu Xian believes that possible risks include that Blast is an upgradeable contract, Owner 3/5 multi-signs, and has no time lock; if you want to run away, you must either multi-sign to upgrade a malicious logic contract, or enableTransition to set up a malicious mainnetBridge.
In the face of security doubts, Blast officials also responded that time locks will reduce the security of smart contracts. In complex contracts, immutable contracts may not be as secure as upgradable contracts; each signature key of a multi-signature is Independently secure, each key should be stored in cold storage, managed by an independent party, and geographically separated; one of the multi-signature addresses will be updated within 1 week to switch the underlying hardware wallet provider; a single hardware will be ensured Wallet types will not be used 3 out of 5 times and remain secure even in the event of unprecedented hardware wallet compromises.
As for Blast’s rough model, it can be roughly divided into two aspects. One is technical roughness, that is, a so-called L2 with nothing, which absorbed hundreds of millions of dollars in asset lock-ups by relying only on a simple intermediary custody contract. , in just a few days, it has surpassed the advantages accumulated by other star public chains for more than half a year or even more than a year; second, the operation is rough, and the already criticized invitation mechanism and points system of Paradigm's two masterpieces, Blur and friend tech The gameplay is repeated as it is, and combined with the mandatory lock-up before the mainnet launch and the ranking list that is strongly related to airdrops, it captures the psychological inertia of users chasing airdrops and not seeing rewards for a long time, and makes players FOMO each other.
Although this rough model is indeed "ugly", it is actually reasonable. With the endorsement of famous institutions, successful projects as precedents, real sources of income and calculable APY, and a clear expiration time, storing ETH/stablecoins in Blast is essentially equivalent to a kind of DeFi lock-up mining. Lido or Maker provides a basic rate of return, and the future Blast airdrops that points can be exchanged for are mining profits.
Impact on other L2s
Although some people believe that the emergence of Blast will have an impact on other L2s, or force them to make more clear airdrop incentives, Blast has reached more than 500 million US dollars in TVL in a short period of time. In fact, it is not by sucking the blood of other L2s. brought.
Since the calculation at 0:00 UTC on November 21, all the top four L2 public chains in TVL have experienced growth. Linea, which has fallen the most, has less to do with Blast. Linea TVL's substantial increase from US$86.5 million on November 15 to the historical peak level of US$263 million on the 23rd was mainly related to the liquidity integration of the cross-chain bridge Orbiter and Rhino. Arkham data shows that the addresses marked as suspected Orbiter (0x3F…6372 & 0xA7…73cE) and the Rhino address (0xC4…5eCB) net injected nearly 50,000 ETH into Linea in the past week (23 days ago); the subsequent TVL decline was also related to Orbiter It is related to the liquidity withdrawal of Rhino and Rhino. It may be some kind of liquidity test for Linea cross-chain.
After removing the extreme values, the graph is clearer. The TVLs of mature leading players including Arbitrum and Optimism, which have issued tokens, L2, and the highly anticipated Base , zkSync Era, Mantle and StarkNet are all showing positive growth. The emergence of Blast may have much less impact on other L2s than market voices believe.
In the case where the mainstream L2 core data is not significantly affected, it is less likely that it will release accuracy airdrops or make more substantial incentives. Most of them should still maintain the status quo and maintain the existing operating strategy. In fact, the author believes that compared with other L2 activities such as Odyssey and airdrops that are not clearly related, Blast’s public airdrop strategy based on the points system is just a change in the airdrop customer acquisition strategy, rather than a direct application of the underlying technology and ecosystem. Contest. Therefore, it can also be seen that the fundamentals of most other L2 public chains are still stable and will not be significantly affected by the strength of a new thing.
The funds absorbed by Blast should mainly come from idle funds. The main reason for idleness is the reduction of DeFi yield, especially there are few stable mining pools suitable for large funds, and Blast provides "Lido/Maker's basic yield + points exchange A DeFi mining pool with institutional backing and considerable returns such as "airdrop mining income" is very attractive to these funds that pursue stable returns and controllable risks.
Impact on Blur
At the same time as the launch of Blast, Pacman also introduced a staking mechanism for BLUR, which can earn points representing airdrops, while the airdrop of S3 will be divided equally between NFT traders and BLUR stakers. As of November 26, 336 million BLUR has been pledged, worth more than $200 million, exceeding 10% of the total.
Although there is currently no clear connection between Blast and Blur, Blast should be regarded as part of Pacman's expansion of Blur, the NFT trading market, like the lending platform Blend. According to official data, during S2, Blur achieved a transaction volume of US$6.1 billion, with more than 260,000 users, occupying an average of 65% of the market share, and has steadily surpassed OpenSea to become the absolute leader in the Ethereum NFT trading market; along with the spot As the market gained a firm foothold, Blur's lending market Blend also quickly occupied a major share in the NFT lending field, forming the Matthew effect of the strong always getting stronger. Blur and Blend have already occupied major market shares in their respective circuits, and both are self-operating and can bring stable income. They will become the basic foundation for continued expansion in the future. Therefore, there is no Pacman as some pessimists think. Abandoned Blur and started a new one.
(Data source: https://x.com/blur_io/status/1726755862423990409?s=20 )
Referring to CEX token trading, futures trading volume is often several times that of spot trading volume and is one of the core sources of income, so NFT futures are also worth trying. Unlike CEX, which firmly dominates FT's futures trading volume, the resistance of on-chain NFT futures is significantly smaller, but it also needs to overcome the problem of high Gas on Ethereum.
Pacman believes that the two biggest opportunities for NFT are to reduce transaction costs and institutional-grade NFT Perps. This is why L2 is needed; while Blur Bid Pool accumulates tens of thousands of ETH but cannot enjoy the benefits. It can also come with the launch of L2 To solve this problem, Blast with underlying Staking benefits came into being. In the future, the ETH in the Blur Bid Pool is likely to be deposited on Blast, and then blurETH will be returned as a transaction. While trading, you can also enjoy the native ETH staking benefits. You may even not be attached to Lido in the future and build a native one yourself. staking agreement; in addition, transaction costs are significantly reduced, which in turn may stimulate more spot trading volume.
If blurETH built in Bid Pool in Blast can also be directly used as a trading pair asset for NFT Perps or add some composability similar to GLP, this may release greater liquidity.
Since it is L2, Blast will definitely be open to more protocols and developers in the future, and it may not be impossible for Paradgim to build a super application similar to friend tech on Blast. In order to capture users and give back to the community, these new applications will consider airdrops to Blast and its closely related Blur users.
