Parsec Weekly #47
Blur seasons 2 finale & Blast
Blur S2 and Blast
Monday was scheduled to be the end of Blur season 2 and the subsequent airdrop of $BLUR to those who participated, but there was a surprising new development that few were expecting. Alongside the above, Pacman and co announced Blast, an EVM compatible L2 with native yield and a focus on streamlining the NFT ecosystem. Along with it, a brand new and heavily gamified magic internet points system to keep everyone entertained and build TVL until the chain goes live.
The Blast bridge currently exists as a one-way multisig contract on ETH, the chain and withdraws will be live in February, with the token and airdrop coming in May. At the time of writing a staggering $374m of ETH and stables have been sent to the contract, both are periodically converted to stETH and sDAI respectively to produce the yield, this alone has contributed an extra 1.69% to Lido’s TVL so far.
In a separate thread, Pacman detailed some extra motivation for creating Blast. “Hundreds of millions have been spent on gas trading NFTs” - prospective users of the chain can look forward to lower gas fees and “institutional-grade NFT perps”.
Blur has a history of being opaque with this kind of stuff until they are ready to launch, so it’s hard to say what all of this functionality is going to look like. Regardless, I think that after 260k users and a 65% average marketshare Blur warrants its own chain. Native perps at that scale on a fast and cheap chain will lay the building blocks for all kinds of cool NFT applications this cycle. Add in a money that automatically rebases to bring in TVL and users, allocate half of the airdrop to developers and you’ve got a pretty good recipe for growth! Blast chain devs are also going to share in gas fees. I’ve got to hand it to Pacman, he knows how to disrupt and innovate.
The only thing I’m a little confused about it is why they didn’t just go for “Blurchain”, and how they are going to balance the two tokens. Though, the first half of that is probably easily explained by a new cap table and another raise.
Blur S3 rewards will be in Blast tokens instead of $BLUR. Specifics are not out yet, what we do know is that half of the airdrop will go to users of the platform, the other half goes to $BLUR stakers. Yet another layer of clever gamification/incentivisation, stakers receive an initial points multiplier for the first five days following the airdrop, and then a time based multiplier that increases by 0.5x per month which is lost once unstaked.
Currently 328m $BLUR ($207m) is locked up in the contract which seems to have contributed to its 126% rally since the post airdrop lows.
As always we appreciate your readership, if you enjoyed this article please leave a like and share it around. Have a good weekend and we’ll see you next week!
Wow
YOO