Around $400 million in Ether (ETH) was withdrawn from the Ethereum layer-2 network Blast following the launch of the mainnet on February 29 at 9:00 p.m. UTC, which liberated nearly $2.3 billion in staked cryptocurrency that had previously been locked up on the platform.
Blast, an optimistic rollup blockchain scaler, provides users with up to a 4% yearly return on deposited Ethereum (ETH) and 5% on stablecoins retained on the network, derived from staked ETH and United States Treasury Bills (T-Bills) controlled by MakerDAO.
Blast Launches Official Mainnet
According to DeFiLlama data, Blast’s total value locked (TVL) has decreased to $520 million since its introduction, with roughly $1.8 billion withdrawn.
The platform’s assets comprise about 479,000 ETH, 78.5 million USDC, 68.3 million USDT, 148,000 stETH, and 31 million DAI, according to a Dune Analytics dashboard.
Blast, which claims to be the “only Ethereum L2 with native yield,” received a lot of interest when it unveiled its deposit-only bridge in November. This bridge swiftly attracted over $2 billion in deposits, with depositors earning Blast “points” for keeping their ETH.
The expectation was that these points would eventually be redeemed for a token airdrop, thus traders engaged in “points farming” to acquire them.
Airdrops are used by cryptocurrencycurrency protocols to provide tokens to early users and contributors, who often aid in decentralized governance. Blast aims to make an impression on the congested Ethereum scaling market, which includes networks like as Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, and Base, by encouraging users with both native yield on staked bitcoin and tokens via airdrops.
With the network officially operational, traders holding Blast Points can redeem their investment and seek greater possibilities elsewhere. Given that the price of ETH has risen significantly since Blast opened to depositors late last year, from roughly $2,000 to around $3,450, some traders may be looking to cash in on winnings.
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