Users of the popular NFT marketplace Blur claiming their $BLUR token airdrops last night were greeted to some news: Season Three of Blur will feature a collaboration with Blast, an L2 blockchain with “native yield” that features staking and yield farming.
Blast, which was cofounded by Blur’s Tieshun Roquerre (known as pacman), raised $20 million in a funding round with Paradigm, StandardCrypto, and eGirl Capital. That news was made public on November 20th on X.
Although Blast has not yet officially launched, holders can look forward to compound interest that appreciates over time, and “Blast rewards.” The L2 blockchain will be an EVM-compatible optimistic rollup that lets users earn yield on stablecoins such as $USDC and $USDT.
Currently, the company is offering a one-week window where they are promising to send an airdrop to new users who stake with them. However, the blockchain is still working on the L2 and its bridge. For the time being, money deposited with Blast enters a five-person multi-sig wallet and is then staked on Lido (ETH) or MakerDAO’s DSR. According to the report, the L2 blockchain is expected to launch after the first staking period ends in February.
Roquerre said on a post on X that an “L2 with native yield” would be great for the the entire on-chain economy, including NFTs, lending, dexes, perps, and “even SocialFi.”
Over the past 24 hours, the Blast community has reported 23,638 new users. Still, some in the crypto community are bearish on the new L2, claiming that certain aspects of its release, like incentivizing referrals to friends, hint at a pyramid scheme. That said, Blur has remained a top NFT marketplace despite critics, and Blast looks like another boost for its ecosystem.
Blur’s Aggressive Marketing Tactics Pay Off
The Blur NFT marketplace launched in October 2022 with a goal of serving professional NFT traders. Although it has been criticized for incentivizing wash-trading through token-rewards, the marketplace has managed to stay afloat and even thrive in the bear market. Here are three of our most recent stories about Blur.
First, seven months ago, Blur released a new peer-to-peer lending protocol called “Blend” to add liquidity to the NFT market. With the new service, traders can offer their NFTs as collateral for ETH, and the loans, unlike most NFT lending protocols, have no set expiration date.
Next, on February 15th, Blur passed OpenSea for the first time in daily trading volume. In a period of seven days, the marketplaces generated $460 million worth of Ethereum, tripling the trading volume of OpenSea ($107 million) during the same time — according to data from DappRadar.
Finally, about nine months ago, Blur began dropping Blur governance tokens to reward traders on the marketplace. The tokens were given to traders who listed an NFT for sale on Blur, who bid on an NFT, and even to Ethereum traders who used a competing marketplace in the six months leading up to Blur’s launch.
If anything, Blur has shown that its willing to try new things and take risks, and it seems to be paying off. We’ll have to be patient to see if its latest L2 blockchain Blast is successful. If it is, Blur will likely continue its rein as a top NFT marketplace for professional traders.