Blast, the controversial Layer 2 from the team behind the leading NFT marketplace, Blur, has been accused of forking Optimism’s code within minimal changes without giving credit to its original author.

On Jan. 31, Pop Punk, the pseudonymous founder of Gaslite, posted side-by-side screenshots of the codebase for Optimism and Blast, alleging that Blast made a handful of changes to pass the code off as its own.

“Hey Blast, It’s not very cash money of you to fork Optimism’s code, add a typo, remove a function, and then change the license,” Pop Punk tweeted.”

“Worth reminding that removing the license is literally one of the only things that you are not allowed to do with MIT,” added Pseudo, a researcher for Scroll.

Blast has not publicly addressed the accusation. The Defiant reached out to the team for commentary but is yet to receive a response.

Blast controversy

Blast ruffled feathers across the Ethereum ecosystem in November when it announced an airdrop campaign promising “native” yield for users that transfer ETH and stablecoin to a deposit contract while awaiting the launch of its network in February 2024.

Yields are generated by depositing stablecoins with MakerDAO and converting Ether into Lido’s liquid staking token, stETH — which has garnered criticism for failing to self-limit its dominance despite coming alarmingly close to controlling one-third of staked ETH’s supply. Depositors also earned points which are expected to qualify holders for an airdrop and cannot be redeemed until May.

Critics slammed the project for failing to ship any code and offering no security guarantees beyond a three-of-five multisig account. Yet Blast attracted nearly $500M worth of deposits within five days despite the concerns, and now holds $1.34B in assets, according to DeBank.

Optimism to distribute 30M OP as grants

On the same day, Optimism flagged that it would transfer 30M OP ($87.3M) from its Foundation’s general treasury wallets to a dedicated wallet for distributing funds for its third round of retroactive public goods funding (RetroPGF).

Optimism said the third round of RetroPGF funding will be disbursed from Feb. 1. The funds are used to retroactively support projects within Optimism’s ecosystem contributing to its growth.

Optimism’s OP Mainnet currently ranks as the second-largest Layer 2 network with a total value locked of $5.14B, according to L2beat.