BLUR jumps 12% as Blur founder raises $20m for new L2 network

Additionally, Blur founder Tieshun Roquerre raised $40 million to contribute to the Blur ecosystem.

Tieshun Roquerre, the founder of NFT marketplace Blur (also known as “Pacman”), is launching a new layer-2 network where users can reduce transaction costs for digital collectibles. In a thread posted to X on Nov. 21, Roquerre addressed high network fees, saying “hundreds of millions have been spent on gas trading NFTs.”

Moreover, Roquerre says “almost every” decentralized application, or DApp, on a blockchain has an issue when users lock up their funds in pools, which do not generate yield for them.

“This means that Blur users are losing money through depreciation. As I dug deeper, I realized that almost every dapp on-chain has this issue.”

Tieshun Roquerre

In a bid to solve all these issues “at once,” the Blur founder decided to launch Blast, a new layer-2 network with native yield for DApps, where users could avoid asset depreciation as well as reduce transaction costs for non-fungible tokens. For the new venture, Roquerre raised $20 million in funding from Paradigm, Standard Crypto and others.

To earn yield, Blast “natively” participates in Ethereum (ETH) staking, automatically returning the staking yield to the network’s users and DApps. In addition to ETH, Blast also earns yield for stablecoins with USDB, the network’s native auto-rebasing stablecoin.

Beyond Blast, Roquerre announced he had raised another $40 million to contribute to the Blur ecosystem. The proceeds are expected to be used for building DApps atop Blast in order to “continue advancing” NFTs on Ethereum as well. Amid the news, Blur’s native token BLUR jumped 12%, surging to $34, according to CoinGecko data.