BLAST was brought to life by the creators of the incentivized NFT marketplace Blur. The overhead currency distribution at launch generated a market cap of $392 million. It shows that the price of the BLAST token rose by just over 20% to $0.024 at the time of publication. Despite this increase, the token’s current market value is around $408 million and its daily trading volume is around $730 million.

The overhead currency distribution brought 17% of the total supply of the BLAST token to market. 7% of this distribution has been allocated to users bridging Ether or USD Blast (USDB) to the network since late last year. Users who contributed to the success of decentralized applications (dApps) on the network received another 7% of the total supply. The remaining 3% is reserved for future community coin distributions by the Blur Foundation.

Unfortunately, the launch of the BLAST token did not go smoothly. The creators of incentivized NFT marketplace Blur have faced significant challenges from scammers on social media. Numerous fraudulent posts have attempted to trick users by claiming that Blast’s overhead currency distribution started earlier than planned. These posts appeared to have the same identity as Blast’s legitimate Twitter account, leading to fake websites and making non-existent promises such as “Golden checkmarks” offered by the platform’s owner, Elon Musk. These suspicious links even made their way to Blast’s official Discord server before being removed by a community moderator. Cybersecurity company Scam Sniffer detailed that a user lost $217,000 in cryptocurrency after visiting a phishing site. This incident highlighted the ongoing challenges of combating fraud attempts on the platform.

Although the overhead currency distribution was successful, the BLAST token received criticism from market commentators on Twitter. The focus of these criticisms is the lack of a staking mechanism for BLAST tokens. Staking is a method of earning interest by locking cryptocurrencies for a period of time. The lack of a staking mechanism in BLAST tokens may reduce investors’ interest in this token in the long term.

Additionally, some BLAST token holders have expressed their intention to immediately sell the tokens they received via airdrop as the markets open. This creates concern that the token’s supply will increase and its price may decrease. Blast’s airdrop is the second Ethereum layer-2 blockchain airdrop following the zkSync airdrop in June. The zkSync token distribution was also met with heavy criticism from the community. The reason for these criticisms was that many users took advantage of using multiple wallets (Sybil addresses) created by the same user to claim a large number of tokens.

It remains unclear how the BLAST token will perform in the coming days. Negative factors such as fraud attempts during launch and the lack of a staking mechanism may suppress the price of the token. But the overhead currency distribution and increase in market value also reveal BLAST’s potential.