Blast L2 TVL Over $830 Million, Upgrade Announced by Paradigm

A novel farming project Blast, which has already amassed over $830 million in deposits, is working together with its key investor Paradigm to get rid of controversial narratives. Here’s how they are planning to do it.

Blast L2 undergoes major upgrade “to set better precedent,” Paradigm’s Dan Robinson says

Cryptocurrency veteran Dan Robinson, general partner and the head of research at heavyweight crypto VC Paradigm, announced an advancement in Blast’s technical design. The protocol will migrate to a new upgrade system next week, he said on X yesterday, Dec. 8.

The new time-locked upgrade system is open source from the onset and can be used by projects interested in “emulating” Blast, he stressed. Robinson attached two GitHub Gist links with the updates to the LaunchBridge.sol contract.

In particular, the withdrawAndLosePoints function is affected. As explained by Paradigm’s GP, the upgrade is aimed at “setting a better precedent.”

As covered by U.Today previously, Blast was criticized for abusing the L2 narrative, promoting a “single-node sidechain” as an Ethereum-based rollup.

Blast TVL goes through roof: Fastest-growing L2?

Also, its tokenomical design was slammed for the uncertain rewards the majority of liquidity providers are attracted by.

However, criticism fails to prevent Blast from reaching new highs in terms of total value locked (TVL). By press time, LPs injected over $838 million in equivalent in USDC, DAI and Ethereum (ETH), as displayed by the DefiLlama tracker.

Largely, this sum was injected in the first days of Blast’s public beta launch. In its Dune Analytics dashboard, crypto investor 21Shares displays Blast as the fastest-growing network, stressing that it cannot be treated as a second-layer scaling solution:

Note: Blast is not an L2 yet but they have started allowing users to deposit via a multi-sig Contract

DefiLlama also listed Blast as a yield farming app, not as a separate L2 blockchain on Ethereum (ETH).