The highly anticipated airdrop of the Ethereum Layer 2 network Blast finally went live on Wednesday morning, giving away free tokens worth hundreds of millions of dollars to users.
However, within minutes, many airdrop claimants immediately started selling their BLAST packs, pushing down the token’s price and leading to disappointment among many in regards to the token giveaway, as many apparently expected a larger scale.
The BLAST token made its debut this morning at around $0.025, making the total value of the 17 billion tokens airdropped in the first phase today approximately $430 million. Of these, 14 billion tokens (valued at $354 million) were specifically reserved for Blast users as rewards.
However, within minutes, a large-scale sell-off of the token pushed the price down to $0.02. At the time of writing, the value of the token pool reserved for Blast users in today’s airdrop has dropped to $289 million.
Part of the reason for the sell-off may be due to the disappointingly low opening price of BLAST in the DeFi community. Considering the popularity of the Blast network among crypto whales, and the substantial amount of funds raised during the airdrop period by Blast’s predecessor, Blur, many had high expectations for the token. Blur is a disruptive, incentivized NFT market.
While there is no doubt there is both genuine disappointment and engaging junk posts on crypto Twitter – indeed, many users will immediately sell their airdrops, regardless of what the token is or its price – the prevailing sentiment at present is that BLAST’s airdrop did not bring the immediate windfall many traders had expected.
Ahead of this morning’s airdrop, crypto traders were predicting that BLAST would land between $0.03 and $0.10, a range that has not been reached so far. Just a month ago, the token was trading at $4.40 before listing, an astonishing amount that would have made today’s airdrop worth $74.8 billion.
Nevertheless, free money is free money – this morning, several Blast users on Crypto Twitter emphasized this, urging others to hold unrealistic expectations and/or celebrate what they did receive.
The airdrop rewarded users who transferred a large amount of cryptocurrencies onto the network. During the airdrop process, the total value of locked assets on the Blast network surged to $2.3 billion on June 5. Since then, it has plummeted by over 30% to $1.6 billion according to DefiLlama.
Andrew Hayward, Editor