I listened to the Blast AMA by
@PacmanBlur last night. It went on for over 1 1/2 hours and he addressed many questions, concerns and criticisms.
Before I go into more details, let me be clear: from this point on, I will judge the ecosystem management by only one parameter: how Pacman and the Blast team support and champion builders and users. That’s all that matters.
An onchain ecosystem whether mobile or not, thrives on its apps and people. Without them, the Blast mobile app won’t make it. That’s obvious and Pacman knows this; it’s not some secret wisdom. But words alone won’t change anything. Only actions will.
That said, let’s highlight a few topics from the AMA:
➡️ Pacman at his core is a product builder and the mobile app has more in store than it currently appears. The best news? You will be able to experience this firsthand in the coming days. days, not weeks. The first apps go live in the coming days.
➡️ The heavily incentivized USD APY won’t last long. It was a door opener, but once apps are live, it will be reduced/stopped, shifting the focus to the apps.
➡️ Marketing will start once the product and app ecosystem are in place. I agree with Pacman that marketing before reaching this point wouldn’t be effective. The way Blast Mobile aims to enable promotion sounded promising (think web2 apps), but we’ll see how it plays out in reality.
➡️ I’ll hold my judgment on this point until I can evaluate it in practice, but I found it a bit concerning that the focus may shift away from focusing primarily on supporting apps to instead incentivizing a user network. Don’t get me wrong: access to a large user base is the most attractive reason for builders to deploy on a chain. But: 1) Blast lost most of its users, so there currently is no strong user network. 2) Most users will be attracted and converted by apps, not by parking USD for crazy APY.
I need to see in practice what he really meant, but it sounded to me like there will be far fewer incentives for apps and more focus on parking USD, which actually prevents native assets from thriving - as we saw in S1 & S2 with points and yield for
$ETH and USDB.
imo, this would be a huge mistake. Now is not the time to stress out the remaining builders even further by forcing them to compete with high USD APYs or requiring them to use
$BLAST token as the primary currency.
Instead, this is the time to double down on builder support to attract users to the ecosystem. This should be done through 1) the infrastructure and 2) the remaining 28% of community incentives, which should go through apps to users; not for USD parking or requirements of BLAST as primary currency.
➡️ Not all concerns could be addressed in one AMA, but Pacman said more AMAs will happen regularly. That’s good, but again we will judge by actions, not words. Staying hyper active in communication is crucial.
➡️ Conclusion:
The Blast hype has been gone for ages, and the ecosystem is about to change drastically. Maybe Blast needed this reset.
I hope Pacman listens to all the concerns and criticisms, but ultimately, I will judge him based on how he supports and champions builders and users.
An ecosystem cannot be built by just one team or consist of just one token.