Original - Odaily
Author - Azuma
On November 21st, Blur founder Pacman (Iron Mountain) announced that he would launch a new project Blast.
Blast is a Layer 2 network that uses the Optimistic Rollup mechanism. With the launch of Blast,Pacman also announced that the project has received US$20 million in financing, with participation from several angel investors including Paradigm, Standard Crypto, eGirl Capital, and Mechanism Capital co-founder Andrew Kang, Lido strategic advisor Hasu, and The Block CEO Larry Cermak.
When talking about why he wanted to create Blast, Pacman explained that he discovered two problems during the operation of Blur.
First, with the expansion of business volume, Blur users NFT transactions on the Ethereum main network have consumed huge gas fees, so it is necessary to expand the application to the lower-cost Layer 2 network.
Second, hundreds of millions of dollars of funds in the Blur bid pool have been passively sleeping, failing to earn any income, and this situation exists in almost every application in every chain, which means that these funds are suffering from inflation. passive depreciation.
Therefore, Pacman decided to build a new Layer 2 network that allows the funds in the account to passively earn interest - Blast.
Before explaining how Blast works, Pacman compared ETH’s native staking yield to the USD’s Risk Free Rate (RFR).If in the real world, your rate of return fails to outperform the RFR, it means that your assets will be passively devalued due to inflation. Similarly, in the on-chain world, ETH has a stable staking return of 3% -4%. rate, but most of the funds in Layer 2 accounts are only placed statically (yield 0%), which means that these assets are being passively depreciated due to the inflation of ETH.
It is this problem that Blast hopes to solve, providing the possibility of passively earning interest on funds in Layer 2 accounts.
Specifically, when a user deposits funds into Blast, Blast will then use the corresponding ETH locked on the Layer 1 network for native pledge of the network, and automatically return the obtained ETH pledge income to the users on Blast. In short, if a user holds 1 ETH in an account on Blast, it may automatically grow to 1.04, 1.08, or 1.12 ETH over time.
In addition to ETH that can participate in native staking, Blast also supports passive interest generation of stablecoins. The specific operating mechanism is that when users bridge stablecoins (such as USDC, USDT and DAI) to Blast, Blast will then deposit the corresponding stablecoins locked on the Layer 1 network into U.S. debt-based DeFi protocols such as MakerDAO, and use Earnings will be automatically returned to users on Blast in the form of USDB (Blasts native stablecoin).
Pacman further explained that Blast’s vision is not just to serve Blur, but to support all types of Dapps, such as DEX, lending, derivatives trading, NFTFi, and even SocialFi.
Compared with the general type of Layer 2, Blast as Optimistic Rollup continues the operational inertia of EVM users, but provides users with a brand new profit window.
Pacman concluded,Layer 2 is not just an execution environment, but also a liquidity environment. Blast with its native yield will unlock new possibilities for on-chain finance.
According to Blast’s official introduction, the network is now open to Blast Early Access, but only invited users can access it.
After users enter the Blast network through early access, they can not only immediately enjoy the passive interest earning of 4% of ETH or 5% of stable coins, but also accumulate Blast Points rewards at the same time.
As for the follow-up time plan, Blast plans to launch the mainnet and develop withdrawals on February 24 next year, and open the redemption of Blast Points on May 24 (redeem is used in the original text, without detailed explanation).
Currently, many users who have obtained early access qualifications are sharing invitation codes on social media. Interested users may wish to browse the information stream to see if they can get early access to participate.
