Blast Token Soars 40% on Market Debut
27 Jun, 2024 ● Coin news
The newly launched native token of the Ethereum layer-2 network Blast (BLAST) saw an impressive 40% increase following its debut, outperforming several other notable airdrops recently introduced to the market.
BLAST was initially priced at $0.02 per token, giving it a fully diluted value (FDV) of $2 billion at launch, based on combined data from Ambient Finance and the perps trading platform Aevo.
According to CoinMarketCap, the price of BLAST has since climbed by just over 40% to $0.0281 at the time of this report.
This performance stands in stark contrast to other recent major token launches like Ethereum layer-2 network zkSync (ZK) and the cross-chain interoperability platform LayerZero (ZRO), which have seen declines of 46% and 43% from their initial prices, respectively.
The BLAST airdrop distributed 17% of the total token supply, with 7% allocated to users who had bridged either Ether or USD on Blast (USDB) to the network since late last year.
Another 7% was awarded to users who "contributed to the success" of decentralized applications (DApps) on the network, and 3% was given to the Blur Foundation to support future airdrops to its community.
The airdrop faced some criticism from crypto market commentators on X, particularly from those who felt the launch valuation did not meet their expectations.
Arthur Cheong, co-founder of crypto investment firm DeFiance Capital, expressed surprise at BLAST’s $2 billion FDV, having anticipated a value closer to $5 billion.
The Blast network, co-founded by Blur creator Tieshun Roquerre, who is better known by his pseudonym PacMan, faced criticism from its own seed investors in November for lacking sufficient features to justify a one-way bridging mechanism that required users to lock up their ETH for several months.
Similar to other high-profile airdrops this year, such as the cross-chain bridge protocol Wormhole, Blast’s airdrop event drew a significant number of scammers on X.
Scammers often target large airdrop events, posing as convincing replicas, since airdrops typically necessitate crypto users to connect their wallets and sign transactions to receive their tokens.
The crypto security service Scam Sniffer reported that a user lost over $217,000 to a Blast airdrop scam after signing multiple phishing signatures.
Sources:
https://ambient.finance/trade/pool/chain=0x13e31
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/blast/
