In this overcrowded L2 race, BLAST could come out as its winner. Reasons why, are not obvious. A detailed explanation

Layer 2s are scaling solutions with the goal of

1) lowering transaction fees (tx) by combining multiple off-chain transactions into a single layer 1 transaction

2) maintaining security by settling txs on Ethereum Mainnet

3) expanding use cases.

Almost all current L2 solutions meet criteria 1 and 2, but none except for one meet 3rd criteria, too.

Here's a list of some ETH L2s:

Arbitrum, Blast, Optimism, Manta, Metis, Mantle, Base, Starkware, zkSync Era, Scroll, Zora, Linea, zkEVM

Why is "Blast" ranked 6 of all existing blockchains and rank 2 by all L2s?

This L2 has not even launched and yet it has such huge amount of TVL already.

Now comes the 3rd criteria to play:

a) Blast offers "native yield". This is game-changing, no other competitor offers this (exception: Manta Network, but turned into ghost chain, rank 62 by TVL, VC pump and dump project from last cycle previously developed as PolkaDOT's Parachain).

Native yield means that holding ETH or Stables on Blast gives you 4% for ETH and 5% for stablecoins. No staking required, just holding it!

b) Blast also offers "Gas Revenue Sharing". Another game-changer which no competitor offers.

Other L2s keep revenue from gas fees for themselves. Blast gives net gas revenue back to Dapps programmatically. Dapps developers can keep this revenue for themselves or use it to subsidize gas fees for users.

More and more devs will come or migrate their projects to Blast alone because of Gas revenue sharing.

These 2 facts can be read on the docs about Blast, but now we come to the not so obvious facts why Blast will likely be the top L2 of this cycle:

They "only" raised $20M in funds, while other big projects raised hundreds of millions.

At 1st glance it might sound bad, but it is bullish

As investor, especially retail, we want the token to appreciated in price. High funding means a lot of VCs, low funding = less VCs. Less VCs = price doesn't dump, value go up easier.

Blast founder, "Pacman BLUR", is also the founder of the very successful Blur NFT marketplace. Unlike other core devs from previous cycles who leave the industry for good after earning millions of US Dollar, Pacman BLUR kept on building...rare features only found by some few people such as Steve Jobs, Elon Mush and Jeff Beszos.

While the marketcap of Blast memecoins such as ANDY (biggest memecoin) or Pacmoon are fairly small compared to Solana meme ecosystem, this might be lucrative entry points for those who aren't exposed to its ecosytem yet.