Blast, the layer-2 project backed by Blur founder Pacman, has quickly become one of the most talked-about names in crypto. New figures show the protocol’s total value locked has climbed to $660 million. But as capital pours in, the project is also facing renewed scrutiny after publicly announcing a search for senior blockchain engineers.
TVL surged within days
According to the report, Blast’s TVL rose to roughly $400 million in less than a week after launch. Over the following five days, another $104 million was added, pushing the total to $660 million. On Nov. 30, when TVL stood at $634 million, Blast said it was hiring a senior DevOps engineer and a senior protocol engineer.
The team said the protocol had reached 67,757 community members at the time of the hiring announcement. That pace of growth is unusual even in the competitive L2 sector and helped push Blast further into the spotlight.
Hiring post drew criticism online
Blast had already been accused by some observers of resembling a Ponzi-style setup. Paradigm, a lead investor in the project, acknowledged that the team had gone too far in some aspects of communication and execution. Pacman pushed back on the criticism and said Paradigm was not involved in shaping Blast’s go-to-market strategy.
Still, the hiring notice intensified criticism on social media. Commentators mocked the idea that a project with no public mainnet, no testnet, no code, and no employees had already gathered $634 million in TVL. On X, users questioned whether the rollout was credible and whether the project’s execution could match the scale of capital it had attracted.
Asset mix and technical path
Blast currently holds 198,733 ETH, 73,518 STETH, and sizable stablecoin balances, including $39.56 million in USDC, $30.66 million in USDT, and $15.6 million in DAI. Based on the job description, the senior protocol engineer would help adapt the OP Stack, an open-source framework built on go-ethereum and widely used across the Optimism ecosystem and other L2 deployments.
For now, Blast stands out for its rapid capital formation, but questions around product readiness, engineering depth, and execution remain central to the debate surrounding the project.