One man, one playbook, two exits.

On October 2, the Ethereum Layer 2 network Blast posted a short announcement: operating costs exceeded revenue, so it would shut down [1]. Ten days later, the NFT marketplace Blur announced it would take its site offline on November 12 [2].

Both projects came from the same person — Pacman, whose legal name is Tieshun Roquerre.

At its peak, Blur’s monthly trading volume reached $1.43 billion. DefiLlama puts the protocol’s cumulative revenue at $2.26.

Not $2.26 million — $2.26. Every fee went to sellers and creators; the protocol kept $2.26 for itself.

This is the story of someone who pushed “points plus airdrop” to its absolute limit — and a sample of where that playbook ends.

01 The man who beat OpenSea with points

In February 2023, Pacman revealed his real identity on X with one line: “Dropped out of high school to go through Y Combinator at 17.”

After dropping out, he attended MIT and left again, took Peter Thiel’s $100,000 fellowship, built the decentralized domain marketplace Namebase (led by a $5 million Paradigm round, fully acquired by Namecheap at the end of 2021), then turned to NFT marketplaces. Seeing OpenSea’s weaknesses in matching speed and listing tools, he started assembling the team that became Blur in early 2022.

Blur’s formula was simple: zero trading fees, with the real hook being points. The closer your bid sat to the floor and the longer you kept it open, the more points you earned — eventually converted into a BLUR token airdrop.

BLUR launched on February 14, 2023. The first-season airdrop was 360 million tokens, worth roughly $270 million at the ~$0.76 launch price. The next day, Nansen data showed Blur’s daily volume surpassed OpenSea’s for the first time. Galaxy Research found Blur’s share peaked at around 80%, with OpenSea down to 15.5% [3].

In March 2023, Blur’s monthly volume hit about $1.43 billion. How much of that was wash trading? Estimates vary wildly: Dune analyst hildobby calculated roughly 14%, while CryptoSlam put it above 80% in the two weeks after the airdrop.

To pull in sellers, Blur also pushed creator royalties down to a minimum of 0.5%. The Block’s Brad Kay noted that Yuga Labs’ quarterly royalty revenue fell from $8.7 million to $2.5 million, primarily because of Blur’s low royalties and mining incentives. When Blur announced its shutdown three years later, collector Cryptobscure replied on X: “Good riddance. You destroyed NFTs.”

Zero fees bought volume. Points bought liquidity. But the protocol never intended to make money from trading in the first place. That was the foreshadowing of the first exit.

02 $500M raised before the chain even launched

On November 20, 2023, Pacman launched Blast. The pitch was direct: deposit money and it earns yield automatically. ETH deposited into Lido staking returned about 4% annually; stablecoins swapped to USDB, backed by MakerDAO’s Treasury yields at about 5%.

The points system was copied over, plus invite codes. New users needed a code to deposit; per the official docs, the inviter earned an extra 16% of the invitee’s points, and a second-tier invite added another 8%.

The L2 wasn’t live yet, and deposited funds would be frozen for about three months. Even so, DefiLlama showed deposits passing $510 million by November 26 [3].

Lead investor Paradigm balked first. Research lead Dan Robinson posted on X the same day: he disagreed with launching the deposit bridge before the L2 was ready, and disagreed with locking users’ funds for months, saying many of the marketing tactics “cheapened the work of a serious team.”

Pacman fired back with several posts: Blast’s yield came from Lido staking and MakerDAO Treasuries — real economic substance; Paradigm had not participated in Blast’s distribution design, and the lockup and invite-code mechanics were the team’s independent decision.

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

The controversy didn’t stop deposits. Mainnet launched on February 29, 2024, BLAST launched on June 26, and the first-season airdrop was 17 billion tokens. At the ~$0.025 launch price, Decrypt estimated a total value of about $430 million, with 14 billion tokens going to users [3].

Locked value began sliding before the token even launched. DefiLlama data shows the June 6 peak of $2.26 billion had already fallen to $1.63 billion on token day. Users took the airdrop — then left.

03 $850M given out, $2.26 collected

Between Blur’s first two seasons and Blast’s first season, the three airdrops totaled roughly $850 million. Almost all of it was claimed and sold immediately. The moment the airdrop ended was the starting point of the project’s decline.

Blur’s cumulative protocol revenue was $2.26. The roughly $70.82 million in fees users generated on the platform over three years flowed entirely to sellers and creators because of the zero-fee design. Blast’s cumulative on-chain fees were about $13.85 million, of which only about $7.83 million counted as protocol revenue. By the time of the shutdown announcement, the entire chain’s 24-hour revenue was down to $110 [5].

Blast’s shutdown statement said it plainly: “the ongoing costs of maintaining Blast exceed the revenue generated by the L2.”

Blur was the same story. Monthly volume fell from $1.43 billion to under $7 million in March 2026 — a 99.5% drop. The BLUR token fell from its $5.02 launch-day high to $0.0095, a 99.8% decline. Per DefiLlama, Blast’s locked value dropped from $2.26 billion to about $11.5 million at shutdown. L2BEAT, using a broader measure, calculated about $50 million still on-chain — the gap mostly being ETH staked in Lido inside the bridge contract.

Machi Big Brother (Huang Licheng) was also a major Blur player; Decrypt called him one of Blend’s largest lenders. In June 2024 he publicly urged Pacman on X to adjust the mining rules, then two weeks later moved about 18.4 million BLUR into Binance. Spot On Chain estimated the loss at about $3.16 million.

The macro environment offered no help either. NFT trading shrank overall, and Ethereum L2s multiplied. This October, Abstract, StandX, and ZetaChain successively announced shutdowns or migrations, and Farcaster changed hands for the second time this year. Users and capital drawn in by token expectations can’t sustain costs once that expectation is met or broken.

The $850 million in airdrops ultimately flowed into sell orders on the secondary market. What was left for the projects was a bill they couldn’t pay.

04 Two deadlines, one silent founder

Before October 26, Blast users can still withdraw normally through the official interface. After that, assets won’t vanish, but retrieval requires interacting directly with the bridge contract on Ethereum. The team says it will publish instructions before the deadline.

On November 12, blur.io goes offline and Blend stops matching new loans. Borrowers on Blend must repay before then or be treated as in default, with their collateral NFTs going to the lender. Blur says it will later provide a tool to help users retrieve assets from Blend. The only official account is @blur_io; ignore any other “official” notice.

BLUR holders still hold governance over the protocol’s fee switch, but with the site down and trading nearly stopped, flipping that switch collects nothing.

After Blur announced its shutdown, Cointelegraph reached out to Pacman for comment; the report carried no response. What his next step is remains undisclosed.

Three years ago, Pacman used points to beat OpenSea. Two years ago, he used interest and invite codes to collect $500 million in deposits. Now, in the span of ten days, he has shut down the two largest projects he built.

Points can buy users, but not revenue. The next person to try this playbook will probably, one day, issue the same announcement: operating costs exceeded revenue.

References