Two years ago, Blast was billed as one of the most promising chains of its cycle. It pulled in more than $2 billion in user deposits before its mainnet even launched, simply by promising to pay yield on staked ETH and stablecoins directly at the wallet level. Today the network holds about $32 million, and on October 2 its team announced Blast is shutting down.
The reason is unglamorous: it costs more to run the chain than the chain earns. At its June 2024 peak, Blast generated roughly $3.5 million a month in fees. In recent weeks that figure fell below $2,000. Annualized, the network's costs are estimated at around $755,000 against revenue of just $22,700 — a gap the team decided wasn't worth closing for the handful of users still left.
Blast is run by Tieshun Roquerre, better known as Pacman, the same founder behind the Blur NFT marketplace. The project was backed by major crypto funds including Paradigm and Standard Crypto, and its BLAST token launched in June 2024 at a fully diluted valuation near $2 billion. After the shutdown news, the token dropped another 17-19% and now trades roughly 98% below its all-time high.
Users have three weeks to get their money out. Through October 26, assets can be withdrawn via the normal interface, and the team shortened the waiting period to 24 hours to help people move faster. After that deadline, funds remain accessible but only through direct interaction with the bridge contracts on Ethereum — no friendly front end. Assets staked through Lido will take roughly a week longer to exit separately.
Blast is far from the only casualty of the 2024 cycle. Over the past year, projects once treated as category leaders have folded one after another: the DeFi protocol Balancer wound down after a hack, while the mining pool Poolin and the exchange BitMEX both closed after years in business. The pattern repeats: generous token incentives are great at bootstrapping liquidity, but terrible at keeping it once the rewards run out and competition among L2 networks keeps growing.
