Standard Crypto: Why We Invested in Blast?
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Standard Crypto: Why We Invested in Blast?
Blast is the first Ethereum L2 with native yields for ETH and stablecoins.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Colin Hong, Standard Crypto
Compiled by: TechFlow
At Standard Crypto, we believe one of the most interesting opportunities in crypto today is defining the “winning” layer for Ethereum scaling. Liquidity wants to be fungible and frictionless—it flows to where it’s strongest and most rewarding—which means the prize for winners is enormous.
While L2 ecosystems are developing smoothly, we see an opportunity to build a new Layer focused specifically on the long-term growth of sustainable on-chain yields (such as staking or RWA). Modern Ethereum infrastructure wasn’t built to handle yield-bearing assets. As a result, users end up bearing extra friction, such as having to wrap or deposit tokens just to earn yield. A new Layer offers a chance to rethink how existing native yield assets interact with your wallet and dApps.
For these reasons, we’re excited to announce our investment in Blast—the first Ethereum L2 with native yield for both ETH and stablecoins. It’s built by Pacman, founder of the popular NFT marketplace Blur.
Blast represents an opportunity to re-architect L2 infrastructure with yield-bearing assets treated as first-class citizens—a complete rethinking from the ground up. If ETH had been a native yield-rebasing token from day one, even basic building blocks like Uniswap pools would have been designed differently.
With Blast, that capital becomes more efficient, earning nearly $100 million in additional interest annually based on current Uniswap TVL. This could serve as a bridge to broaden the landscape of yield-seeking assets on Ethereum today.
Idle ETH and stables will transform into their native-yield versions. Wallets become savings accounts; dApp TVL generates revenue. Users can now earn yield directly and natively from their assets, without any opt-in action required. We strongly believe in the power of “defaults.”
The Great Infrastructure Reset
The risk-free rate is the return you should expect for taking zero risk. A traditional example is Treasury bills—investors buy government bonds with cash and receive a risk-free yield upon maturity, assuming the U.S. government doesn’t default. The Merge created a similar situation for Ethereum, where staking rewards are effectively risk-free within the system—if either Ethereum or the U.S. government fails, the underlying asset wouldn’t be worth anything anyway. Moreover, the risk-free rate helps calibrate risk-adjusted returns—if individuals don’t meet or exceed it, they lose out to inflation.
This presents a significant opportunity. Neither Ethereum nor current L2s were designed with widespread adoption of yield-bearing assets in mind. Their ecosystems were designed and built during an era when the primary on-chain assets—ETH and stablecoins—lacked native yield. Before the transition to proof-of-stake in September 2022, simply holding ETH provided no native rewards, and most stablecoins still don’t pass treasury yields to users. Due to this path dependency, billions sit in AMM pools paired with ETH and across NFT markets.
Yield as a Primitive
TVL is an imperfect metric, but it has served as a proxy for measuring dApp protocol success and growth. Across categories like exchanges, lending, perpetuals, and even social, most successful dApps have accumulated billions in user deposits. Rebuilding ETH and stablecoins natively unlocks new business models for developers, providing momentum beyond the incentive phase. Imagine a perpetual DEX charging zero trading fees and instead profiting from the collateral in its liquidity pool.
Furthermore, Blast itself can profit by capturing yield. This means Blast no longer needs L2 sequencer fees for revenue—and can even rebate gas costs back to the dApps generating them. This makes building on Blast highly attractive and eliminates the need for dApps to spin off their own chains by allowing them to internalize gas costs at the general-purpose L2 layer.
Why Pacman?
Blockchain adoption doesn’t come directly from technical improvements, but from the development of high-quality ecosystems for developers and users. Markets have repeatedly observed that if underperforming chains fail to find product-market fit and lack compelling destinations, they turn into ghost towns.
Pacman is one of the most execution-capable entrepreneurs we’ve seen. His pace of product development is prolific, and he’s demonstrated strong, creative incentive design. Blur’s invention of “Season Points,” widely adopted across the broader market, gave developers greater flexibility in incentives, enabling implicit rewards for explicit behaviors. He deeply cares about end-user experience, obsessively seeking user feedback and rapidly integrating it into his products.
We believe Pacman is a natural steward for an L2, and we’re excited to see his creativity applied in a space freer than ever before.
Earlier this year, when Pacman first approached us about building an L2, the motivation came from his search for the right layer to deploy the Blur L2 dApp—essential for low-value NFT trading in high-gas environments and ultimately for an NFT perpetual DEX. As our discussions deepened and features like native yield emerged, we realized that despite the L2 space maturing rapidly, there was still room for another winner.
As a long-term believer in crypto, as a degen, as a crypto-native venture investor, I believe programmable money is the future—I’m just here to enjoy the ride.
Those of us onchain regularly stress-test ideas so the strong can survive—we try things out in the arena. Through network participation, voting, and signaling with our capital and attention, we shape the infrastructure that ends up being used.
Natively rebasing the token base is the optimal way to deliver yield, and existing ecosystems weren’t designed around this mechanism. This is Blast’s opportunity—a chance to build around today’s asset primitives from the core up.
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