Can you plagiarize something that needs to be copied?
On Wednesday, January 31, blockchain researcher 0xKaden called out the controversial crypto project Blast, mainly for stealing code and trying to pass it off as his own. In particular, Blast, a highly anticipated but also highly criticized project that raised more than $1 billion last year using what some call manipulative marketing techniques, is accused of stealing work already published by Optimism, one of the largest Ethereum L2s .
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“Blast is really putting a BSL license on the optimism MIT code here,” Kaden wrote. “Does this mean that people can no longer have optimism because it has a license to explode??”
Kaden was referring to the permissive software license developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which gives authors copyright credit but allows others to freely access and remix code — usually with attribution — and the Business Source License, which is not open source.
Shortly afterwards, another pseudonymous blockchain sleuth, Pop Punk, posted screenshots comparing parts of Blast and Optimism’s code, which were indeed identical save for a few occasional tweaks, including a typo. “Hey Blast, it’s not very cash for you to fork Optimism’s code, add a typo, remove a feature and then change the license,” Punk said on Twitter/X.
This isn’t the first time Blast has apparently crossed boundaries. It had a pedigree to brag about, including founder Tieshun “Pacman” Roquerre, the developer behind the highly successful decentralized NFT exchange Blur, respected venture capital backer Paradigm, and an innovative idea to offer users “native yield.” But Blast arrived on the scene amid a firestorm of controversy.
When it was announced, the project had delivered nothing more than a one-way bridge that would allow people to deposit money but not withdraw money – they would have to wait until February 2024 at the earliest. Furthermore, users sent funds to a wallet with five keys and multiple signatures, where all signers appeared to be connected to a single entity. It raised more than $1.1 billion before hiring engineers.
Perhaps even worse than this lax approach to security was the way Blast actively solicited deposits and hyped the project, encouraging the flow of deposits by promising an airdrop in May determined by a ‘points system’. It was a move that even Dan Robinson, general partner at Blast’s largest lead investor, Paradigm, said “cheapens the work of a serious team” and “sets a bad precedent for other projects.”
Blast’s business model itself isn’t necessarily outrageous; the plan is to offer annual returns of approximately 4%-5%, earned by staking deposited ETH on Lido and utilizing MakerDAO’s DAI savings rate. Points systems are also an increasingly common way for projects to determine how to distribute tokens, which some say make them more difficult to play and lead to fairer outcomes. It’s also hard to criticize Blast’s efforts to drive growth by offering a referral system and other gamified ways to earn points – it’s just natural marketing.
Furthermore, Pacman said the team would encourage outside development by sending 100% of gas fees to developers who build on the network. He also raised an idea regarding NFT perpetuals, given Blast’s close relationship with Blur. It’s clear enough that Pacman has a strategic mind, to the extent that I wonder if he sometimes stirs up controversy to attract attention – perhaps like plagiarism in work that can be copied.
The question is how far should a project go in bending crypto’s cultural norms, and perhaps even the law (MIT licenses have certain restrictions), in an effort to make a name for itself and build a user base? Blast is launching at an opportune time, an era of massive layer 2 growth. But the field is full of established rival networks, including Arbitrum, Base, Optimism and Polygon, among many others.
Also see: Blast’s one-week, $600 million shipment shows promise of returns
At launch, if it does launch, Blast will differentiate itself by being the first to offer users returns on ETH and stablecoins, an attractive feature that some believe could become the next big trend in crypto – taking advantage of Ethereum’s equivalent of a “risk-free return.” The multi-sig situation isn’t far from the norm either, as all L2s today are governed by similar setups, some with pseudonymous signers as well.
However, it is clear that the project is playing fast and loose, indicating that it is looking for a win in what it sees as a zero-sum game to capture capital, attention, users and development talent.
“The ONLY people I know who are excited about Blast are airdrop farmers. Developers see it for what it is. A chain for farmers,” Pop Punk, the pseudonymous developer, told CoinDesk in a direct message.
Also see: Ethereum Layer 2 Blast has divided crypto users over its impact
Copying code is the norm in crypto, as open source communities view information sharing as a positive sum. The fact that Blast’s team is copyrighting the code at all, let alone that the code appears to have been copied, is certainly a way of indicating priorities. Because the MIT license doesn’t have permission, Blast was free to use, remix and distribute Optimism’s code, as long as the version was also made open-source – and it’s telling that it opted for an enterprise license.
Plagiarism battles have occurred in crypto in the past, including between rival zk-proof-based projects Matter Labs and Polygon, which claimed the former failed to properly attribute the latter when using the open source code . Similarly, when announcing its upcoming V4 release, Uniswap caused controversy by announcing that it would publish under a somewhat restrictive license in order to benefit from its intellectual property for longer.
“I think open source is generally done well in Web3, and it’s pretty much inevitable,” Punk said. “Many projects are forks with additional logic and complexity. It enables rapid iteration and build-up. But licenses must be respected, unlike what Blast has done here. It is… a cultural violation, and they are stepping into the legal violations.”
These are problems without clear-cut answers, especially in a space where nominally even competitors naturally participate in the design of open blockchains. The case for copyright protection is that people who contribute something meaningful to the world should benefit from it.
The question is what exactly does Blast contribute and does it deserve protection from the law?