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

Ethereum layer-2 network Blast’s hotly anticipated airdrop finally went live on Wednesday morning, gifting users hundreds of millions of dollars worth of free tokens.

But within minutes, many airdrop claimants immediately began selling off their BLAST bags, pushing the token’s price down and leading many to express disappointment in the token giveaway that many apparently assumed would be multitudes larger in scale.

BLAST’s token debuted at a price of roughly $0.025 this morning, putting the 17 billion tokens that comprise today’s Phase One airdrop at a collective value of about $430 million. Of those, 14 billion tokens—or $354 million worth—have been reserved specifically as rewards for Blast users.

Within minutes, however, the token saw a massive wave of selloffs, pushing its price down closer to $0.02. At writing, the value of the pool of tokens reserved for Blast users in today’s airdrop has fallen to $289 million.

The selloff may have been caused in part by disappointment felt across DeFi circles at BLAST’s opening price. Many had sky-high expectations for the token, given the Blast network’s popularity among crypto whales, and the exorbitant sums collected during the airdrop for Blast’s predecessor Blur—the disruptive, incentivized NFT marketplace.

While there’s no doubt a mix of true disappointment and engagement-stoking shitposts on Crypto Twitter—and it’s true that many users sell their airdrops immediately, regardless of the token in question or price—the broader sentiment at the moment is that BLAST’s drop didn’t deliver quite the immediate windfall that many traders were expecting.

Prior to this morning’s airdrop, crypto traders predicted that BLAST would land somewhere between roughly $0.03 and $0.10, a range it has thus far fallen short of. Just a month ago, the token traded on pre-markets for $4.40—a staggering sum that would have valued today’s airdrop at $74.8 billion.

Nonetheless, free money is free money—a point that several Blast users emphasized on Crypto Twitter this morning, calling out fellow degens for unrealistic expectations and/or celebrating the fact that they got anything at all.

Blast’s airdrop rewarded users who moved substantial sums of crypto onto the network. In the buildup to the airdrop, the total value locked (TVL) of assets on Blast’s network 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