Blast has issued 17 billion BLAST tokens to its network's early adopters in its much-anticipated first airdrop.

The Ethereum Layer 2 scaling network distributed BLAST at 10 a.m. ET on Wednesday, Blast said in an X post. Roughly 35% of airdropped tokens had already been claimed as of the time of writing, Parsec Finance's blockchain explorer tool showed. However, Blast had yet to confirm the total number of claimed BLAST tokens at publication time and did not immediately reply to The Block's request for comment. 

The 17 billion BLAST distributed in the airdrop make up 7% of the 100 billion BLAST tokens in total supply, CoinGecko data shows. 

BLAST was trading at $0.028 at time of writing on the pre-market trading platform Whales Pro. At that price, the total value of the 17 billion BLAST is roughly $476 million. Pre-market trading prices can — and often do — differ widely from official market prices for listed cryptocurrencies. 

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Users of Blast's network received the lion's share of the BLAST airdrop, according to Blast's website. The sizes of users’ BLAST allocations in the phase-one airdrop were based on the number of Blast Points they had accumulated prior to the event, as per the network's tokenomics.

Blast plans to allocate 25.5% of BLAST tokens to its core contributors to the network, while 16.5% will go to the network’s investors and 8% will go to the Blast Foundation, according to Blast’s tokenomics report. The other half of BLAST’s total supply will be earmarked for community initiatives.