Great thread. I'll add from a dev point of view.
@Blast_L2 has done an amazing job at creating the right environment for DAPPs to thrive, NOBODY has done it this way.
1. Yield backed in natively for Dapps to work with. (Manta doesn't have this) -> allows devs to rethink all web3 projects with a yield twist.
2. Big hackathon released same time as Testnet. THIS IS HUGE, nobody has ever done this so hard and so quick.
3. Support from the chain itself, very quickly and with a fat financial incentive. Again killing competition.
Each one of these decisions was extremely smart and tactical and required steel balls.
Blast FTW
Some thoughts on L2s with and without native yield:
I was originally a pretty vocal skeptic of Blast, mainly because I felt annoyed with their marketing and was disappointed that they'd released without an actual product. It's still a multisig with almost $1.5b in TVL, but my opinions have changed quite a bit.
When it comes to rollups, a lot of the discussions on CT have always been centered around optimistic versus zero-knowledge, specifically concerning the longevity of either and which approach would win the hearts of users in the end. We've written and read thousands of threads about how zk tech is superior to other forms of scaling tech, but it hasn't mattered much.
Even though Optimism, zkSync, Arbitrum and Starknet all came into the limelight at a similar time, the optimistic ones have remained the most dominant, even despite the fact that they already have tokens and possess higher transaction costs.
Why haven't ZKRs taken off yet? Why do Blast and Manta have over 10x the TVL of zkSync and Starknet combined?
Everyone who participates in crypto twitter knows that we like to call this a big casino, one where we don't denominate the chips in traditional money - we use attention instead. Cobie articulated this better than I am now in a substack post, but it's pretty clear that there's a hot ball of money constantly rotating across apps, chains and conversation spheres on twitter.
It's taken so long for Starknet and zkSync to act fast and announce tokens, that users have simply moved on. This is obvious enough, as L2 airdrops were a pretty hot topic in the second half of 2021 when I showed up here. So if it's this simple, why am I writing a really long tweet about it. Well, I wanted to discuss the developments we've seen around L2 design, these being almost entirely non-technical.
Looking at Blast specifically, the entire game was essentially a pyramid scheme to attract deposits through the use of attention manipulation. Influencers or anyone with larger accounts or networks were able to promote their ref links to Blast, the L2 with native yield - they received a kickback from deposits, and users were able to share their own referral links or simply earn rewards depending on how much ETH was accumulated in a given group (or pool). From here, the TVL gains began to speak for themselves.
Even if you were a vocal critic of this marketing approach and despised the fact that there wasn't anything to do on this ghost town of an L2, there's a strong chance you still threw some ETH across the bridge and messed around for an hour or two. Why is that? Well, you probably didn't want to miss out. At the very least, you tweeted something about Blast and spread the word, achieving what I can only assume was the goal all along.
Blast was never going to win over the more technical side of twitter, and it wasn't going to win over anyone who doesn't have a large number of followers or large bankroll to take advantage of the point system. But it's somehow succeeded and managed to shed nearly all of the negative press, thanks to another very useful tactic: an enshrined ecosystem, funded by Blast and its team.
This tactic has been mentioned recently by my good friend Godking, but I'd like to discuss it in slightly more detail. One of the major issues that's plagued existing rollups is a lack of opportunities or more generally, a lack of things to do once you've bridged over. It's always the same forks of Uniswap, Compound and a handful of aggregators that are only useful for disguising yourself as an active and engaged user of these rollups. Once TVL reaches a certain point, the more established apps deploy, giving a little more credibility but doing little to incentivize organic interest.
The enshrined ecosystem approach of Blast - and most notably Berachain - has made it far easier to stand behind a chain or L2 as a community member, as you're able to relate more to a group of branded applications that were tailormade for the ecosystem. It's less extractive, a lot more attractive to a broader userbase and helps provide a counter-defense against more heavily funded rollups with 10 figure treasuries and retroactive airdrop plans.
Where am I going with this?
I'll get to the point. What originally felt to me like a dumb attempt at separating users from their ETH has morphed into a new meta that I don't see going away, one that I don't really mind as it's a breath of fresh air. Blast feels like a more honest attempt of a crypto project telling it like it is - you and your tokens are the yield, but you get to participate in something different. Whether or not Blast (or Manta) is able to cultivate an ecosystem as dedicated as Optimism, Berachain or even Solana as an L1 example is not relevant. They took a different route, but they're still going to arrive at the same destination as all of their competitors.
If crypto's only success so far has been the enabling of hyperfinancialization and weird incentive mechanisms, why not experiment a little bit and really lean into our strengths? TradFi only owns about 3% of the total BTC in circulation, there's a long way to go before we need to put on a suit and act like we're serious.
I'm curious to hear your guys' thoughts on this and if any of it rings true to your experience as a frequent user of any L1s or L2s, incentivized or not.