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Crypto venture capital firm Paradigm has criticized Blast’s marketing strategy, stating that the startup has “crossed lines in both messaging and execution.” The firm, which is a seed investor in Blast, expressed its disagreement with Blast’s decision to launch a bridge before its layer-2 network and to not allow withdrawals for three months. Paradigm believes that this sets a bad precedent for other projects and cheapens the work of a serious team. Despite these concerns, Paradigm acknowledges that Blast’s team consists of world-class builders with the ability to create great products. The governance structure of Blast is unclear, as is Paradigm’s role in the startup’s decision-making process. Blast has also faced criticism from Jarrod Watts, a developer relations engineer at Polygon Labs, who believes that the network’s centralization poses a significant security risk. Watts also claims that Blast is not a layer 2 and that it lacks withdrawal functionality, requiring users to trust that developers will add this feature in the future. Despite the controversy, Blast has amassed over $555 million in total value locked since its recent launch. The protocol claims to be the only Ethereum L2 with native yield for ETH and stablecoins, and an airdrop is scheduled for January.