Big investors' tombs, retail investors' gospel, is Blast becoming popular amidst the criticism?

Author: Luccy, BlockBeats

Since the beginning of this year, the airdrops of several major projects such as STRK, ZK, and ZRO have been quite "complicated." The mouse warehouse scandal and large-scale witch hunts have left retail investors and studios in distress, while the Blast airdrop has become synonymous with the phrase "something big is coming."

Yesterday, Blast officially opened the airdrop claims and announced its tokenomics. The total supply of BLAST is 100 billion tokens, with 50% allocated to the community, of which the first phase airdrop accounts for 17% of the total supply.

A Boon for Retail Investors and Studios

Unlike previous airdrops, when searching for the keyword "blast" on Twitter, most of the content displayed on the homepage is praise.

In the first phase of the Blast airdrop, Blast point holders can allocate 7 billion BLAST, gold point holders can allocate 7 billion BLAST, and the Blur Foundation can allocate 3 billion BLAST. Most importantly, the Blast airdrop does not check for witches, and after experiencing the baptism of layerzero, Blast is undoubtedly generous to studios.

Moreover, according to community feedback, those who take DApp tasks seriously or persistently can earn a minimum of several thousand gold points, with costs of less than one Ethereum. This means that even with a small investment, the worst returns can still double. Therefore, there are many voices on Twitter praising BLAST, believing its price is undervalued.

However, the fate of Blur does not seem to be going smoothly. Although Blur promptly announced the launch of the fourth season rewards and loyalty program, it still faces redemption selling pressure.

According to on-chain data analyst Yu Jin's monitoring, two BLUR staking whales redeemed 12.52 million BLUR (approximately $2.71 million) and 8.39 million BLUR (approximately $1.79 million) after receiving the BLAST airdrop (partially unlocked), and transferred them to trade on CEX. BLUR also experienced a significant price drop in a short time. Furthermore, there were anomalies in the Blur Season 3 airdrop claim contract, with some users being prompted to pay over $1,000 in gas fees when claiming.

But the BLAST airdrop has undoubtedly made retail investors and studios very happy, even calling Blast founder Pacman a "genius," as it seems that this time "something big has really come." However, amidst the cheers, the big holders of Blast have been backstabbed.

PUA Continues, Big Holders Suffer Betrayal

In the airdrop announcement, Blast specifically emphasized that the airdrop for big holders will vest linearly, meaning that the top 0.1% of users (about 1,000 wallets) will have a portion of the airdrop vest over 6 months. According to the first phase of the activity, vesting requires meeting a monthly points threshold.

This means that not only is there a lock-up, but users are also effectively required to continue interacting for 6 months. Moreover, the linear unlocking was completely unexpected. Given the recent lackluster market conditions, the possibility of these BLAST tokens being worthless in six months is not zero, which is a "disaster" for big holders.

Currently, according to the Blast official website, the top user @beijingduck2023 has a total score of about 281.2 billion and 1.22 million gold points. He stated that he received 64,000 BLAST, which is worth only $1,664 at the current price of $0.026.

From the Twitter operation perspective, @beijingduck2023 seems to be a new account created for Blast points, and he has not expressed many opinions about Blast. In contrast, other big holders who received BLAST appear to be less calm.

Christian, co-founder of the crypto fund NDV, stated that he deposited over $50 million into Blast and received 20,912,000 BLAST, worth about $540,000, but due to linear unlocking, he can currently only claim $100,000 of the airdrop. Christian labeled Blast as a scam project and referred to its founder Pacman as a "serial rug entrepreneur."

Feeling deeply betrayed by Blast, Christian chose to block Pacman and wrote a lengthy post accusing "genius" Pacman of the "seven deadly sins."

Christian believes that Blast missed the opportunity to issue tokens at the best time. In March, the market was good and the time was short; if the token had been issued simultaneously with the mainnet, all participants would have benefited greatly, and even big holders would have willingly accepted the lock-up. However, the project delayed for more than three months, leading to a decline in market cap expectations, and OKX and BN no longer supported it.

Additionally, the lack of technical capability is a major issue for Blast. Due to insufficient technical accumulation and lagging infrastructure development, the yield model, while seemingly good, has a poor experience even for basic needs like cross-chain bridges, making it difficult for exchanges to withdraw directly and for retail investors to enter. Furthermore, the Blast team has continuously engaged in PUA with users, from March to May, and then from May to the end of June, now big holders find they still have to endure PUA for another six months.

Christian also has views on liquidity issues, believing that the project team lacks a deep understanding of liquidity, possibly because they do not have traditional DeFi experience and are not big holders. He emphasized that big holders are the group that cannot be offended in the crypto space; although they are few in number, they support the on-chain ecosystem and token prices. Big holders are the key to supporting token prices and ecosystem liquidity, while exchange data can be manipulated through fake volume, the real fundamentals are still supported by that 20% of big holders.

Although the distribution of gold is relatively decentralized, Christian believes it is still controlled by small interest groups. While he is also an investor in some of these projects, he stated that this binding means that the quality of ecological projects cannot compare with organic development in the long run.

Finally, Christian pointed out from a personal perspective that Pacman lacks a sense of responsibility. He mentioned that the Blast team had previously agreed to have a call with him to gather feedback, but when the agreed time arrived, they did not show up. At that time, it was 1 AM local time, and he waited for an hour without receiving a reply to his messages, and there was no apology afterward.

Vis initially deposited over 10,000 Ethereum into Blast, but in recalling his subsequent participation in Blast, he stated that due to exiting this PUA game early, his returns from the first three months of participation were directly zero.

Moreover, the top five bidders on Blur, @GCsheng, also stated that the claiming rules for Blast are based on a queue, and those with fewer tokens can cut in line, leading to longer waiting times. Additionally, Blur farmers can only claim a maximum of 1 million tokens at a time.

Huang Licheng Takes Over, Is Blast Going Down a Dark Path?

Currently, the two major trading platforms, Binance and OKX, have not listed BLAST. Apart from Coinbase, only Bybit, Bitget, Upbit, Bithumb, and WOO X have announced the listing of BLAST. According to Coingecko data, as of the time of writing, the price of BLAST is $0.025, with a 24-hour increase of 2.4%.

From the price performance, whether Blast can escape the "death upon issuance" fate remains uncertain. But as Christian said, big holders are the group that cannot be offended in the crypto space; although they are few, they support the on-chain ecosystem and token prices. Now, the airdrop from Blast has indeed angered big holders, and its development after losing their support is even more unpredictable.

According to on-chain data analyst Yu Jin's monitoring, Blast allocated 220 million BLAST to six market makers for market making, including: 80 million to Wintermute; 50 million to Manifold Trading; 30 million to GSR Markets; 20 million to Auros Global; and 20 million to Amber.

However, as the saying goes, the more you criticize, the higher the traffic; black and red is still red. Currently, Blast has not made any statements regarding this interest dispute, and many people are still willing to continue investing in BLAST. According to Nansen data, Huang Licheng's address has accumulated purchases of BLAST worth $5.37 million, ranking first on the on-chain buying list.

Additionally, on-chain information indicates that Huang Licheng's address has been continuously buying BLAST in batches since last night and has provided liquidity for BLAST on the Blast ecosystem DEX protocol Thruster, and as of the time of writing, he is still buying BLAST.