Web3 Track Butcher: Who is "Tieshun"?

Author: Terry, Vernacular Blockchain

There is no shortage of legends in the crypto world. Hayden Adams, the "unemployed youth" who never knew how to program, entered Web3 From the launch of Uniswap, the pinnacle product, to Andre Cronje (AC) as the "King of DeFi" single-handedly launching and igniting dozens of well-known and popular projects, this kind of technology giant is stirring up a certain track and even the entire encryption industry. The story is not uncommon.

Blur founder Pacman (better known as his Chinese name "Tieshun") is undoubtedly the most popular representative of the new generation in the past year.

However, slightly different from Hayden Adams and AC, Although Tieshun debuted for only more than a year, it has continuously profoundly affected and even subverted the NFT trading market, NFT lending, These three tracks of Ethereum L2 can be called "the strongest catfish of Web3".

01 Who is "Tieshun"?

In October 2022, the NFT trading market Blur was officially launched (paradigm led the investment of US$11 million in seed round financing). Although platforms such as LooksRare and x2y2 have already tried to combine Token economic incentives. They launched vampire attacks against OpenSea, which has not released tokens for a long time, but they have had little effect and failed to change OpenSea's dominant market position.

Until Blur came out, it completely subverted the entire NFT trading market, and almost directly caused the valuation of OpenSea to "cut off" 90% from over 13 billion US dollars in the following year, so that Consider selling:

As soon as Blur went online, it launched three killer tricks: zero transaction fee (compared to 5% for OpenSea), branded Airdrop, and freely set royalties, which spread virally in the community. Completed the accumulation of initial users.

Subsequently, Blur further relied on the expectations of Token Airdrop to catalyze users to actively "publish orders and wash volume", allowing its own advantages in trading liquidity and trading depth to continue to expand, and the overall user experience soon improved. More than OpenSea.

By the beginning of 2023, Blur has replaced Opensea as the new leader in the market. As the "catfish" of the NFT trading market, the long-lasting NFT trading market has ushered in a long-lost variable.

In this context, on February 22, 2023, Blur founder Pacman, who originally remained anonymous, tweeted to introduce his basic situation:

He dropped out of high school and college twice, and joined the well-known entrepreneurial incubator Y Combinator at the age of 17. He studied mathematics and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received the Thiel Scholarship created by billionaire Peter Thiel.

As a serial entrepreneur, Blur is his third entrepreneurial project and his second in the crypto world—the first is a company A company called Namebase, sold to Namecheap.

In addition, he also said that when he created Blur, he had considered whether to use his real identity or remain anonymous. He also discussed this issue with Anish Agnihotri of Polychain Capital. , and finally Anish convinced him by saying "You can be anonymous first and then make it public, but not the other way around", and finally decided to use anonymity first.

However, Pacman did not directly disclose his real name.However, some insiders dug out the details based on social media related information and found out that his real name is suspected to be Tieshun Roquerre (this is where Tieshun's name comes from) Come).

02 NFT and the top “wall-breaker” on the L2 track

As Wen Chu said That said, the biggest difference between Tieshun and other crypto entrepreneurs such as the founder of Uniswap is that he has been struggling all the way and has stirred up many tracks with new products——Launching Blur in 2022< /strong>, after subverting the structure of the NFT trading market, Tieshun did not stop there, and then successively launched Blend and Blast to massacre other tracks.

In April 2023, Blur officially launched Blend, which stirred the NFT lending market, especially bringing new variables to the NFT lending and liquidity fields.

As a peer-to-peer perpetual lending protocol, Blend supports any collateral including NFT, but does not rely on oracles and has no settlement date, allowing borrowing positions to remain open indefinitely until liquidation, with interest rates Determined by the market.

Like Blur, Blend has extremely strong momentum. The total amount of ETH issued has exceeded 50,000 in just two weeks, and it has quickly grown into the leader in the field of NFT lending.

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Then in November 2023, Tieshun took action again, eyeing the Ethereum L2 field, launching Blast and still using the well-known Airdrop playstyle,relying on the pledge interest and Airdrop expectations With the invitation-based three kings, the 5-day TVL exceeded US$500 million, surpassing star L2 projects such as zkSync, Starknet, and Linea in one fell swoop.

You must know that Blast has not yet been launched on the main network at this time, and there are no users who can experience participating DApps. In this way, TVL still breaks through the integer level one after another, quickly attracting up to 2.3 billion in more than three months. The huge amount of money in US dollars is growing at an insane rate.

At the beginning of this month, the Blast mainnet was also launched, announcing that 50% of the Airdrop will be allocated to Blast Points (users), and the remaining 50% will be allocated to Blast Gold (DApp).

Generally speaking, Tieshun can be said to be the top “wall-breaker” in various mature tracks:

NFT trading track: Blur overturned OpenSea, which was firmly established in Diaoyutai, and became one of the new mainstream NFT markets;

NFT borrowing track: Blend’s total transaction volume has exceeded 5 billion US dollars, Become the leader and firmly sit on the Diaoyutai;

L2 track: Blast’s TVL exceeded 2.5 billion US dollars, according to L2Beat statistics, second only to Arbitrum (14.4 billion US dollars) and Optimism ($8.1 billion) is higher than a series of other L2s such as starknet and zkSync, ranking among the top three L2s.

Image source: L2Beat 

03 What is the right or wrong way to play "Web3 Pinduoduo"?

To a certain extent, Tieshun is using a mature Web3 product strategy with its own Web2 style to reduce dimensionality and attack a number of Web3 products:

Best-brand Airdrop, traffic thinking, creating liquidity, etc., from the original Blur, to Blend and now Blast, are all the same.

Including Namebase, his first crypto startup project mentioned above. If we look back, we can vaguely see the "bidding order auction" and "Airdrop" currently used on Blur and Blast. and other operational strategies, which also shows that Tieshun's success is inseparable from his consistent product concepts and the summary of his previous entrepreneurial experience.

In fact, regarding products and marketing, Tieshun once expressed in an interview that part of the inspiration for Blur's growth strategy came from Taobao, but I personally feel that it may be more summarized as "Web3 Pinduoduo" It’s appropriate, especially Blast’s “Airdrop anticipation + social fission” gameplay, which is essentially replicating Pinduoduo’s marketing strategy in Web3:

Similar to the “cutting” of Moments, Blast After the launch, social media was once full of invitation code-related tweets, and it was very successful in terms of communication effect and growth rate.

Including Blast’s points gameplay and exit mechanism that have recently caused controversy in the community - more friendly multiplier points and withdrawals for new users. To exit, funds must be withdrawn to Waiting for a 14-day withdrawal period after the mainnet also makes people think of Pinduoduo's logic of "new users can cut more" and "last penny".

Therefore, Tieshun’s strength may lie in thoroughly understanding the mature methods of Web2 Internet marketing from the product marketing level and flexibly applying them in the Web3 field, thus achieving a one-way crushing of existing Web3 products—— Seize the market pain points, attract user traffic and market liquidity through Airdrop, and continue to accumulate its own advantages to achieve reversal.

04 Summary

If Blur’s success comes from seizing the market’s pain points and attacking In terms of innovation in technology, Blast is quite darkly humorous - a new L2 that has no application and is driven solely by the expectation of Airdrop has achieved such results in just a few months.

Is it the application scenario that chooses L2 because of its better efficiency, or is it because L2’s efficiency experience can promote better application scenarios? Blast has also stimulated a big discussion in the community about L2 efficiency and application. Its novel style of play has subverted the previous growth model of L2 to some extent. Maybe we can try to create a TVL first and then application. new road.

From another perspective, Tieshun is indeed a leader in Web3 products and marketing. Which track will he "subvert" next? let us wait and see.