Blast Universe
What we built
We migrated to the Blast L2 ecosystem with the primary goal of finding a faster, cheaper environment to scale beyond the limits of Ethereum Mainnet. We launched with Staking as our foundational feature, where users deposited ETH to earn both Blast Points and Spacebar Points, a strategy that successfully capitalized on the "points meta" of the time, driving us to three hundred thousand users in just two months and establishing us as one of the highest-TVL projects on the chain. To transform this financial infrastructure into a living world, we built layers of gamification: Star Sweepers as a skill-based arcade game, Squares as NFT-based onchain guilds to organize users, and Bebob as a collaborative raid boss summoned through onchain activity. We also integrated the externally mandated Blast Gold system, which required us to constantly redistribute incentives to our users to maintain retention, and connected it all through PFP NFTs that acted as multipliers for earning points.
What worked (sustainable value)
Despite the chaos of the points incentives, Star Sweepers proved that genuine fun was a stronger unifying force than yield. The sixty-second arcade loop, featuring capsules, bonus stars, and even "bug-turned-feature" megastars, created real excitement where players posted clips and competed on leaderboards purely for the thrill of the game, validating that gameplay can anchor a community. Squares also demonstrated the power of digital tribes; communities adopted the NFT-based structure to build shared identities, with some even organizing their own organic events like "Square Wordplay" where members collaborated to form words for rewards. Additionally, the integration of PFP NFTs, despite its flaws, successfully allowed us to identify distinct communities and build partnerships, proving that visual identity is essential for a legible digital state.
What didn't work
The reliance on Staking and Spacebar Points backfired by creating a transactional culture where users focused solely on farming for an airdrop ($AIR) rather than genuine participation. Inflation became unmanageable as whales dominated the leaderboards, and even when we tried to pivot rewards toward gameplay, the perception that "points equal money" had already set in, causing TVL to drop when users realized they couldn't out-farm the wealthy. The Blast Gold system exacerbated this tension; although we tried to distribute it fairly based on complex formulas involving staking, gameplay, and social engagement, the opacity of the criteria led to constant community friction and accusations of centralized bias.
Mechanically, our attempts to force engagement failed. Bebob, intended as a social game where Squares had thirty minutes to collaborate, devolved into a mindless "click-and-earn" chore that users performed only for points. Similarly, Square Spirits, designed to measure collective activity by tracking when members acted together, became a confusing metric that frustrated users rather than motivating them. Finally, technical barriers remained high; users were terrified to connect cold wallets holding valuable PFPs, and our delegation systems frequently broke, leading some users to equip cheap, random NFTs just to game the point multipliers, effectively diluting the identity system we tried to build.
What we learned
The Blast Universe experiment clarified that building a community on solely financial expectations creates a fragile foundation that collapses the moment incentives are removed. We learned that staking is merely infrastructure, not content, and that passive accumulation cannot replace the deep, active participation needed for a digital nation. We discovered that features like Squares need robust communication tools and intrinsic motivation to function as more than just point-farming guilds, which is why they will return in Outer Space as governance centers rather than yield aggregators. Ultimately, we realized that systems like Bebob and Spirits failed because they lacked "fun," cementing our conviction that the future, including the return of Staking via HypurrCorea and the evolution of Star Sweepers, must be built on governance, creativity, and active play, not just the promise of an airdrop.