I've seen a number of misunderstandings about Blast spreading around. While many of these are humorous memes, it's important to set the record straight on a few points: 1/ There's a meme going around that Blast is a ponzi. The yield that Blast provides users can feel too good to be true, so this meme is understandable. But to put it simply, the yield Blast provides comes (initially) from Lido and MakerDAO.

Lido yield comes from ETH staking yield, which is part of Ethereum's Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism. Yield for ETH in this case is coming from Ethereum itself.

MakerDAO yield comes from on-chain T-Bills. T-Bills are debt obligations from the US government. They are central to how the US economy works.

These yields are not unsustainable. They are a core component of the on-chain and off-chain economy. The reason the yield feels too good to be true in Blast is because Blast makes this yield the default for everyone. It gives users yield that was hiding in plain sight. In effect, democratizing higher yield.

Two of the biggest opportunities we see for NFTs are reducing transaction costs and institutional-grade NFT perps. Hundreds of millions have been spent on gas trading NFTs, and perp volume is 6x bigger than spot. These opportunities require an L2. At the same time the Blur protocol has another problem. There’s $100m of TVL in the Blur Pool not earning yield. This means that Blur users are losing money through depreciation. As I dug deeper, I realized that almost every dapp on-chain has this issue.

1/5 The vast majority of volume in traditional markets and token markets come from a handful of market makers (literally less than 10). Trading activity from MMs looks very different than trading activity from collectors. I'm seeing a lot of confusion on my timeline about this. 2/5 Before Blur there were very few MMs in NFTs. @franklinisbored and @machibigbrother are some of the first MMs to trade with size (relatively speaking). They are akin to the Jump's and Jane Street's of NFTs. As the space matures you will see more MMs come into the space.

Web2 me vs Web3 me

A thread 🧵 When we started working on Blur 401 days ago, I had a conversation with @_anishagnihotri on whether to doxx or build pseudonymously. I was 50/50 on both choices, but Anish pointed out that being pseudo gave me optionality to doxx later on. It's hard to say no to free options!