Blast Project Gains $650 Million in Staked Ether and Stablecoins

According to Blockworks, the Blast project, a multisig-with-a-plan initiative, now has $650 million in staked ether and stablecoins under its control. The project promises that deposited tokens will earn an on-chain yield, plus rewards of unknown value. Ether staking yield is provided through Lido's stETH tokens, while stablecoins are converted to dai deposited in Maker or savings dai (sDAI). Recently, the Blast deposit interface set its slippage tolerance to an unusually high 10%, causing one user to lose about $100,000 in value. The Blast team claims to have fixed the issue. All assets will be locked until the proposed optimistic rollup launches in February. Depositors to the Beacon Chain were aware that their ether would be locked up for at least a couple of years, with the Merge and subsequent enabling of staking withdrawals happening later. By April 2023, approximately 18 million ETH (about $33 billion at the time) were deposited. In the meantime, liquid staking experienced rapid growth, with Lido becoming the dominant player in early 2022 and accounting for nearly a third of all staked ether by May 2022. Lido's stake share has remained between 29% and 33% ever since, fueling a debate about centralizing market forces on Ethereum. The total percentage staked through Lido currently stands at 32.28%, and Blast, which exclusively uses Lido, is not helping to alleviate concerns about centralization. Some argue that the concentration of ether stake is similar to the dominance of the Go Ethereum (Geth) execution client for Ethereum node operators. Client diversity is considered one of Ethereum's strengths, contributing to its resilience through decentralization. However, others view the increase in Lido's stake share as a feature rather than a problem. Lido now has more total value locked (TVL) than any other DeFi protocol, approaching $20 billion.