Blast Airdrop Puts $354 Million in the Wallets of Users—So Why Are They Mad?

Ethereum layer-2 community Blast’s hotly anticipated airdrop lastly went reside on Wednesday morning, gifting customers tons of of thousands and thousands of {dollars} value of free tokens. 

However inside minutes, many airdrop claimants instantly started promoting off their BLAST baggage, pushing the token’s value down and main many to precise disappointment within the token giveaway that many apparently assumed could be multitudes bigger in scale. 

BLAST’s token debuted at a value of roughly $0.025 this morning, placing the 17 billion tokens that comprise right this moment’s Section One airdrop at a collective worth of about $430 million. Of these, 14 billion tokens—or $354 million value—have been reserved particularly as rewards for Blast customers. 

Inside minutes, nevertheless, the token noticed a large wave of selloffs, pushing its value down nearer to $0.02. At writing, the worth of the pool of tokens reserved for Blast customers in right this moment’s airdrop has fallen to $289 million. 

The selloff might have been precipitated partially by disappointment felt throughout DeFi circles at BLAST’s opening value. Many had sky-high expectations for the token, given the Blast community’s reputation amongst crypto whales, and the exorbitant sums collected through the airdrop for Blast’s predecessor Blur—the disruptive, incentivized NFT market.

Whereas there is no doubt a mixture of true disappointment and engagement-stoking shitposts on Crypto Twitter—and it is true that many customers promote their airdrops instantly, whatever the token in query or value—the broader sentiment in the intervening time is that BLAST’s drop did not ship fairly the rapid windfall that many merchants have been anticipating.

Previous to this morning’s airdrop, crypto merchants predicted that BLAST would land someplace between roughly $0.03 and $0.10, a spread it has to date fallen wanting. Only a month in the past, the token traded on pre-markets for $4.40—a staggering sum that might have valued right this moment’s airdrop at $74.8 billion.

Nonetheless, free cash is free cash—a degree that a number of Blast customers emphasised on Crypto Twitter this morning, calling out fellow degens for unrealistic expectations and/or celebrating the truth that they received something in any respect.

Blast’s airdrop rewarded customers who moved substantial sums of crypto onto the community. Within the buildup to the airdrop, the overall worth locked (TVL) of belongings on Blast’s community soared to $2.3 billion on June 5. Since then, it’s plummeted over 30%, to $1.6 billion at writing per DefiLlama.

Edited by Andrew Hayward