Ethereum
Ethereum L2 Blast Hits All-Time High in Daily Transactions and Users Ahead of Airdrop
Airdrop season continues as Blast’s token generation event is set to take place on June 26, about a week after interoperability protocol LayerZero and rival blockchain network ZKsync opened claims on their airdrop.
Before next week’s drop, Blast has a total locked value of around $2 billion, more than Base’s $1.6 billion.
(Shutterstock/Dmitri Pistrov)
Posted June 21, 2024 at 4:21 PM EST.
Blast, an Ethereum layer 2 blockchain network, recorded all-time highs in daily transactions and active users on Thursday, ahead of its scheduled June 26 release.
According to data from blockchain analytics company Artemisthe number of active wallet addresses on Blast, a rough indicator of active users, more than doubled from around 73,500 addresses at the beginning of June to around 168,400 as of June 20.
The increase in active addresses also coincided with an increase in daily transactions. Users generated 640,000 transactions on the first day of June. Since then, the number of transactions has increased by almost 72%, to 1.1 million transactions, according to the most recent data from Artemis.
Learn more: What is Blast on Ethereum? A beginner’s guide
The unprecedented highs in daily transactions and users come as those across the Blast ecosystem prepare for the protocol’s airdrop, which is expected to take place in less than a week. “Dapps must distribute all gold and points to users by June 25 at 8 a.m. ET for this to be considered,” wrote Team Blast on X two days ago.
Half of the Blast airdrop is allocated to points, which are earned by users based on their wallet balance, while the remaining 50% has been reserved for “Gold”, which is intended for decentralized applications built natively on Blast. According to Blast protocol documents, “Gold is intended to be used as an incentive for Dapp’s growth. This means that Dapps should give 100% of all the gold they earn to their users.
Blast’s record highs before its release also come in the same week. Interoperability protocol LayerZero and rival Layer 2 blockchain network ZKsync have opened up their airdrop claims, aiming to reward their contributing users.
Sybils
The increased network activity in terms of addresses and transactions for the months-old layer 2 blockchain network is a sign of Blast’s popularity among users. But it can also be assumed that a number of these addresses and transactions come from Sybil techniques, in which one person acts as multiple users using more than a single wallet.
The goal of a Sybil attack is to simulate the type of activity rewarded in an airdrop, by distorting the on-chain image of user activity so that attackers can, in this case, claim a larger share of the parachuting. Attempting to identify and disqualify addresses engaged in Sybil activities has become standard practice when preparing a protocol when conducting its token generation event.
Low-scale Sybil activities would mean that a relative handful of Blast addresses were duplicates, while professional Sybil farmers could use thousands of wallet addresses to generate transactional activity on the network.