Blast: The Ethereum Network That Drew $2.3B Before Launch Is Shutting Down

At 14:45 UTC on Friday 2 October 2026, a post appeared on the X account of Blast, a crypto network that had once held more than $2 billion of other people's money. "Blast will be shutting down," it began. The reason took one sentence: "the ongoing costs of maintaining Blast exceed the revenue generated by the L2, and we do not see a credible path to making the chain economically sustainable." A minute later its founder, who goes by Pacman, wrote that he was "disappointed that we weren't able to make the chain sustainable over the long term."

Anyone with money still on Blast has until 26 October 2026 to move it back to Ethereum through the normal website. After that the money can still be recovered, but only by dealing with the underlying programs directly, a job most ordinary users would find hard.

The numbers explain the decision. DefiLlama, a public service that tracks deposits across crypto, put the money held in apps on Blast at a peak of $2.26 billion on 6 June 2024. On the day of the announcement it was about $32 million, and a day later about $23 million. In June 2024 the network earned about $3.5 million in revenue, according to DefiLlama. In September 2026 it earned about $1,800. On 2 October, the day it announced its closure, it earned $110. BLAST, the network's own token, hit its all-time high of about 2.9 US cents on 26 June 2024, its first day of trading. On the evening of 3 October CoinGecko priced it at about 0.014 cents, down 99.5%.

©CMZ chart. Data: DefiLlama

What Blast was

Ethereum is the second-largest crypto network, a shared public ledger on which programs can hold and move money by themselves. It is also slow and, at busy times, expensive, like a motorway whose toll rises with the traffic. A "layer 2" is a faster side road built on top of it. Transactions happen on the side road, get bundled together, and are written back to Ethereum as a record. Arbitrum, Optimism and Base, the network run by the exchange Coinbase, are the best known.

Getting money onto a layer 2 means using a bridge. Think of a border crossing with a vault: coins are locked on the Ethereum side and matching coins are issued on the other. Leaving reverses the trip. Blast was an "optimistic rollup", a design that treats every batch of transactions as honest unless someone proves otherwise within a set window. That is why withdrawals to Ethereum originally took 14 days. In July 2024 the wait was cut to seven.

Blast's selling point was what it called "native yield". On most networks a deposit just sits there, like cash in a current account that pays nothing. On Blast it earned interest automatically. Deposited ether was staked through Lido, the largest staking service; staking means committing coins to help run Ethereum in return for a reward, a little like a dividend. Stablecoins (digital dollars pegged to the US dollar) were swapped for Blast's own dollar token, USDB, and put into a MakerDAO product that holds US Treasury bills. Blast advertised about 4% a year on ether and 5% on dollars. Balances grew by themselves.

The deposit frenzy

The man behind it was Tieshun Roquerre, known online as Pacman, who had already built Blur, an NFT marketplace (a trading venue for digital collectibles) that overtook OpenSea on trading volume in early 2023 by rewarding traders with tokens. Blast was announced on 20 November 2023 with $20 million from Paradigm, one of the largest crypto venture firms, and Standard Crypto.

The network itself did not exist yet. Only the deposit vault did, and money sent to it was locked until February 2024. What depositors got in the meantime was "Blast Points", a loyalty scheme like air miles, earned for depositing and for recruiting friends with invite codes. Everyone understood that points would later turn into a free handout of tokens, an "airdrop", much like a company giving shares to its earliest customers. Within a week more than half a billion dollars had arrived.

Critics called it a pyramid. Pacman replied that the yields "are not unsustainable" and came from Lido and MakerDAO, not from new depositors. The money was guarded by a five-person multisig, an account that needs several keyholders to approve each payment, like a company cheque that needs more than one signature.

The sharpest criticism came from Blast's own backer. On 26 November 2023 Dan Robinson, head of research at Paradigm, said the launch had "crossed lines in both messaging and execution", objecting to opening a bridge before the network existed and locking deposits for three months. "We also think much of the marketing cheapens the work of a serious team," he wrote.

When the network went live on 29 February 2024, The Block reported that more than 180,000 early users had deposited about $2.3 billion, which one analyst said put the unlaunched chain just behind Arbitrum One and OP Mainnet. Not all of it was well looked after. On 26 March 2024 Munchables, a game built on Blast, lost about 17,400 ether, then worth about $62.5 million, to one of its own former developers. The on-chain investigator ZachXBT suggested the developer was a North Korean worker hired under several false names. The money was handed back the next day without a ransom.

Points in, tokens out

The airdrop came on 26 June 2024. Blast handed out 17 billion BLAST, 17% of the 100 billion supply: 7 billion to holders of points, 7 billion to users who had earned "Gold" for using apps on the network, and 3 billion to the Blur Foundation for Blur's community. At its first-day high the token valued the whole project at nearly $3 billion.

That month was the top. Deposits had peaked on 6 June, and by the day of the airdrop they had already slipped to about $1.63 billion. Once the tokens were in hand, many depositors left with them. DefiLlama shows about $1.41 billion in apps on 1 July 2024, $449 million at the start of 2025 and $54 million at the start of 2026. Projects left too: crypto.news notes that Pacmoon, a memecoin project, moved to Solana in August 2024, and that the Blast game Fantasy Top later closed.

The yield pitch was thinner than it sounded. Anyone could stake ether through Lido or hold Treasury-backed dollars without Blast. Its real draw was the points, and once the points had been paid out there was little reason to stay. Revenue fell from $3.5 million in June 2024 to about $106,000 in January 2025 and below $15,000 a month by the middle of 2025. Running a chain still costs money every month: servers, staff, and the fees Blast pays Ethereum to record its batches.

What users have to do, and by when

Anyone with money on Blast, including balances in its mobile app, is being told to move it back to Ethereum. The steps, according to Blast's announcement:

First, Blast is pulling its own deposits out of Lido. That takes about a week from 2 October, and user withdrawals are frozen until it finishes.

Second, withdrawals then reopen with the waiting time cut from seven days to 24 hours.

Third, 26 October 2026 is the last day to withdraw through the normal Blast website.

Fourth, after that, money is still recoverable, but only by using Blast's bridge contracts on Ethereum directly. Blast says it will publish instructions before the deadline.

Dollars come back in a different form from how they went in. Blast's own documentation says USDB is redeemed for DAI, MakerDAO's digital dollar, when it is bridged back, rather than the USDC or USDT a depositor may have sent.

The apology was short: "We're sorry to the users and developers who believed in Blast, built on it, and supported the ecosystem." Not everyone accepted it. Critics on X, among them venture investors, called the closure a "slow rug", crypto slang for a project that lets its users drain away rather than vanishing overnight, and called the venture "extractive". No regulator or court has alleged wrongdoing, and Blast says every deposit remains withdrawable.