Author: White Paper Blockchain

One person, one playbook, two exits.

On October 2, Ethereum Layer 2 network Blast issued an announcement of just a few sentences: operating costs exceed revenue, and it decided to shut down. Ten days later, NFT trading platform Blur announced it would close its site on November 12.

Both projects came from the same person—Pacman, real name Tieshun Roquerre.

Blur's monthly trading volume peaked at $1.43 billion. DefiLlama recorded the protocol's cumulative revenue as $2.26.

Not $22,600, but $2.26. All fees went to sellers and creators, and the protocol kept $2.26 for itself.

This is the story of a person who took "points plus airdrops" to the extreme, and also a sample of this playbook reaching its end.

01 、The man who defeated OpenSea with points

In February 2023, Pacman publicly revealed his real identity on X. He wrote one sentence to introduce himself: Dropped out of high school to go through Y Combinator at 17.

After dropping out, he entered MIT and then dropped out again, received $100,000 in startup funding from Peter Thiel, built the decentralized domain trading platform Namebase, which raised $5 million led by Paradigm and was fully acquired by Namecheap at the end of 2021. After selling Namebase, he turned to the NFT market, saw OpenSea's shortcomings in matching speed and listing tools, and began assembling a team to build Blur in early 2022.

Blur's playbook was simple: zero trading fees, and the real hook was points. Users placed bids; the closer the bid was to the floor price and the longer it stayed up, the more points they earned, which were eventually converted into BLUR token airdrops.

On February 14, 2023, BLUR launched its token, with 360 million tokens airdropped in the first season, worth about $270 million at the post-launch price of about $0.76. The next day, Nansen data showed Blur's daily trading volume surpassed OpenSea for the first time. Galaxy Research statistics showed Blur's share reached as high as 80%, leaving OpenSea with only 15.5%.

In March, Blur's single-month trading volume surged to about $1.43 billion. How much of this was wash trading varies widely by algorithm: Dune analyst hildobby calculated about 14%, while CryptoSlam calculated more than 80% in the two weeks after the airdrop.

To attract sellers, Blur also pushed creator royalties down to a minimum of 0.5%. The Block analyst Brad Kay pointed out that Yuga Labs' quarterly royalty revenue fell from $8.7 million to $2.5 million, mainly due to Blur's low royalties and mining incentives. Three years later, when Blur announced its shutdown, collector Cryptobscure replied on X: "Good riddance. You ruined NFTs."

Zero fees bought trading volume, points bought liquidity, but the protocol itself never intended to make money from trading from beginning to end. This was the foreshadowing of the first exit.

02 、$500 million raised before launch

On November 20, 2023, Pacman launched Blast. The selling point was direct: money deposited earns interest automatically. ETH deposited into Lido staking earned about 4% annualized, and stablecoins were converted to USDB, backed by MakerDAO's U.S. Treasury yield of about 5%.

Points were copied over, and invite codes were added. New users needed an invite code to deposit money; according to official documentation, inviters additionally received 16% of the invitee's points; second-level invitations earned another 8%.

At that time, the Layer 2 network had not yet launched, and deposited funds were frozen for about three months. Even so, DefiLlama showed deposits exceeded $510 million by November 26.

Lead investor Paradigm was the first to speak out. Research head Dan Robinson posted on X that day: he disagreed with launching a deposit bridge before the Layer 2 was ready, and disagreed with making users unable to withdraw for months; many marketing tactics "cheapened the work of this serious team."

Pacman posted several responses in a row on X: Blast's yield came from Lido staking and MakerDAO U.S. Treasuries, with a real economic basis; Paradigm did not participate in Blast's distribution design, and the lockup and invite code mechanisms were decided independently by the team.

In other words: the money is real, the playbook is mine, and it's none of your business.

The controversy did not stop deposits. The mainnet launched on February 29, 2024, BLAST launched its token on June 26, and the first season airdropped 17 billion tokens. At the launch price of about $0.025, Decrypt estimated the total value at about $430 million, of which 14 billion tokens were distributed to users.

Total value locked began declining before the token launch. DefiLlama data showed a peak of $2.26 billion on June 6, which had fallen to $1.63 billion on the day of the token launch. Users received the airdrop, and then left.

03 、$850 million distributed, $2.26 recovered

Blur's first two seasons plus Blast's first season totaled about $850 million in three airdrops. After these tokens were distributed, the vast majority were sold immediately upon claim. The moment the airdrop ended was the starting point of the project's decline.

Blur protocol cumulative revenue was $2.26. The approximately $70.82 million in fees users generated on the platform over three years all flowed to sellers and creators because of the zero-fee design. Blast's cumulative on-chain fees were about $13.85 million, of which about $7.83 million actually counted as protocol revenue. By the time the shutdown was announced, the entire chain's 24-hour revenue was only $110.

The original wording of Blast's shutdown announcement was: "The expenses to maintain operations continue to exceed the revenue the Layer 2 network can capture."

It was the same on Blur's side. Monthly trading volume fell from $1.43 billion to less than $7 million in March 2026, a drop of 99.5%. The BLUR token fell from a high of $5.02 on its launch day to $0.0095, a drop of 99.8%. According to DefiLlama data, Blast's total value locked fell from $2.26 billion to about $11.5 million at the time of shutdown. L2BEAT, using a broader statistical method, calculated that about $50 million in assets remained on-chain, with the difference mainly being ETH staked in Lido within the bridge contract.

Machi Big Brother Huang Licheng was also a major Blur player, and Decrypt called him one of Blend lending's largest lenders. In June 2024, he called on Pacman on X to adjust the mining rules, and half a month later transferred all of about 18.4 million BLUR into Binance; Spot On Chain estimated a loss of about $3.16 million.

The broader environment did not help either. NFT trading as a whole shrank, and Ethereum Layer 2s kept multiplying. In October alone, Abstract, StandX, and ZetaChain successively announced shutdowns or migrations, and Farcaster changed hands for the second time this year. Users and funds attracted by token expectations could not sustain costs once those expectations were realized or disappointed.

The $850 million in airdrops ultimately flowed into sell orders in the secondary market, leaving the project with a bill it could not pay.

04 、Two deadlines, one silent founder

Before October 26, Blast users could still withdraw normally on the official page. After that, assets would not disappear, but could only be recovered by interacting directly with the bridge contract on Ethereum; the official statement said operation instructions would be published before the deadline.

On November 12, blur.io goes offline, and Blend stops matching new loans. Those with Blend loans must repay them before then, otherwise they will be treated as defaults and the pledged NFTs will go to the lenders. Blur said it would later provide tools to help users recover assets from Blend. The only official account is @blur_io; do not trust any other notices claiming to be official.

BLUR holders still have governance rights over the protocol fee switch, but with the website closed and trading almost stopped, even if the switch were turned on, no money would be collected.

After Blur announced its shutdown, Cointelegraph contacted Pacman for comment, and the report contained no response from him. There is currently no public information about what his next step is.

Three years ago, Pacman defeated OpenSea with points; two years ago, he raised $500 million in deposits with interest and invite codes. Now he has shut down the two largest projects he ever built within 10 days.

Points can buy users, but they cannot buy revenue. The next person who tries this playbook will probably also issue the same announcement one day: operating costs have exceeded revenue.