Uncovering the inside story of Blast founder Pacman: From dropping out of school at 16 to building a business empire with a TVL of $1.6 billion
Original author: Pix
Original translation: TechFlow
This is Pacman, the man who dropped out of school at 16. Now he owns a multi-billion dollar empire. Here's the untold story behind the founder of Blast and Blur.
Since he was a teenager, Pacman wanted to build a company. So at 16, he cloned an existing startup and was hired by them. He dropped out of school and moved across the country to work there, and within a year, his entire life changed.
At just 17 years old, Pacman founded StrongIntro, a platform that helps tech startups build and grow engineering teams. Despite his hard work, he passed YCombinator and raised $120,000 in funding, but the project didn’t pan out as he had hoped, and the setback brought him back to square one.
Pacman realized he needed a co-founder for his next venture. He decided to look in the best place possible: college. After two years at MIT, he finally found his business partner, Anthony Liu. Their partnership was further solidified when Pacman received a $100,000 Thiel Fellowship, which enabled him to drop out of school and launch a startup.
(See video for details)
Together with Anthony Liu, Pacman founded Namebase, an on-chain website domain name marketplace. The platform quickly gained traction, with over $10 million in transactions in just three months and over $5 million in funding raised. The company was successful, but they decided to sell the company after two years.
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In 2021, Pacman discovered NFT and was immediately attracted. The first NFT he purchased (Blitmap), earned him 30 ETH, which further sparked his interest. He began writing articles about the field and delving into its details. However, he noticed a significant lack of infrastructure in the NFT ecosystem.
In October 2022, Pacman took decisive action and created Blur, an NFT marketplace. Within a year, Blur became the largest NFT marketplace, thanks to a few key features and strategic airdrops. Despite some criticism and comments like "Blur killed NFTs," the platform's success is undeniable.
(See video for details)
Not content with the status quo, Pacman launched Blast, the first L2 solution with native yield. Initially, the project faced a lot of FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt). However, once Blast came out of the beta phase, it experienced explosive growth with people flocking to get their hands on the airdrop.
Fast forward to now:
The first season of airdrops has been released.
Blast has a total locked value (TVL) of $1.68 billion.
Over 1 million wallets connected to the platform.
Despite these achievements, Blast still faces FUD, and the big question is: Can Pacman change the market sentiment again?
