Blast Readies To Airdrop Tokens Next Week

Blast, an Ethereum Layer 2 network, is set to launch its long-awaited airdrop next week on June 26.

On June 19, the project announced that Blast-based decentralized applications (dApps) must distribute all Blast Gold and Blast Points to users by June 25 in order for holders to be eligible for the drop.

The airdrop will equally divide tokens between users and developers on the network, with 50% allocated to developers through Blast Gold and 50% going to users via Blast Points. Users’ allocations will be determined by their wallet balances and activity on dApps.

Blast noted that users must sign into the Blast dashboard from an eligible Externally Owned Account (EOA) wallet to qualify for the airdrop. EOA’s describe regular non-custodial wallets controlled by a user via a private key.

“If you are a user and your EOA has Points or Gold, you must have signed into your Blast dashboard with that EOA at least once (either by receiving an invite or linking it to an existing account) in order for it to be included in the airdrop calculations,” Blast said. “Don’t forget to link embedded wallets as well!”

Developers are tasked with distributing Blast Points to users at their discretion based on internal metrics. Blast Gold is manually distributed to smart contracts on a bi-weekly basis.

Initially, the airdrop was slated for May, but the project delayed its token generation event last month, upping users’ airdrop allocations at the same time.

Controversial incentives

Blast burst onto the scene back in November, amassing $500 million worth of deposits in five days based on the promise of a future airdrop and native yield for ETH and stablecoin deposits.

However, Blast garnered criticism as quickly as it attracted growth.

Back then, the project comprised nothing more than a one-way deposit contract secured by a multisig account controlled by anonymous developers, requiring that depositors place blind faith in the project not absconding with their assets.

“Blast is not an L2,” Jarrod Watts of Polygon tweeted at the time. “There's no testnet, no transactions, no bridge, no rollup, and no sending of transaction data to Ethereum.”

Yields were also derived from converting users’ ETH into stETH to accrue staking rewards and stablecoins into DAI to access the DAI Savings Rate, making for a dubious “native” yield mechanism.

Nonetheless, Blast’s mainnet went live on Feb. 29, with the network boasting a total value locked (TVL) of $2 billion at the time.

DeFi Dominance

Blast is currently the fourth-largest DeFi protocol by TVL with $3.12 billion, according to L2beat. Its TVL has roughly trended sideways since tagging $3 billion for the first in early March.

Notably, $3 billion or 96.5% of the Blast’s TVL is held in DeFi protocols, positioning it as the sixth-largest smart contract network and the second-ranked Layer 2 by DeFi TVL, according to DeFi Llama.

For comparison, of the $18B worth of assets on Arbitrum, the top L2 by network TVL, only 25% is deposited in DeFi protocols. Similarly, 23% of Base’s $7.52 billion network TVL resides in DeFi protocols, while DeFi protocols account for just 12% of OP Mainnet’s $6.91 billion network TVL.