Pacman (real name Tieshun Roquerre) is the Founder of Blast and Co-founder of Blur, an NFT Aggregator and Marketplace (Aggregate NFT Exchange) designed to optimize the NFT trading experience and provide tools for professional NFT traders in the ecosystem. ^[1][2]

Education

Pacman (Tieshun Roquerre) attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2016 and graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics and Computer Science in 2018. He received a grant from the Thiel Fellowship for Namebase from 2019-2021. Tieshun Roquerre dropped out of high school in 2016 at the age of 17 to join Y Combinator’s accelerator program. ^[3]

Career

Prior to co-founding Blur, Pacman founded Namebase^[4] in 2018 which raised $5m before selling to Namecheap in 2021. Namebase is a domain registrar on top of a DNS protocol called Handshake. Namebase processed tens of millions in transaction volume during his time at the company. ^[3]

Pacman started trading NFTs in 2021:

“As we sold the business, I minted a Blitmap and held it up to its all-time high, which was around 30 ETH, and sold it. I was completely hooked afterwards,” he said.

Blitmap^[8] is an NFT collection featuring 8-bit drawings of a “sci-fi fantasy universe” which launched in 2021.

Blast

Blast, an Ethereum Layer-2 (L2) platform, emphasizes earning native yield in ETH, USDC, USDT, and DAI simply by holding these tokens. Blast's development began with funds deposited into a multisig wallet, totaling over $2 billion for deployment upon Blast's mainnet launch on February 29, 2024.

Blast aims to foster inclusivity for developers, encouraging them to bring projects to the platform with the potential for a BLAST token airdrop. Additionally, Blast pledges to distribute 100% of its gas fee revenue to developers creating dapps on the platform.^[10]

Blur

Pacman co-founded Blur in October 2022. Blur is an NFT Aggregator and Marketplace (Aggregate NFT Exchange) designed to optimize the NFT trading experience and provide tools for professional NFT traders in the ecosystem. It is distinct from other existing NFT exchanges such as OpenSea, Gem, and X2Y2, which focus more on retail and collectibles, due to its use of Ethereum to list assets natively. ^[1]

Identity Reveal

Pacman remained anonymous all through Blur's development until the 22nd of February 2023 when he revealed his identity on Twitter^[5].

In a series of tweets, Pacman said he “enjoyed the privacy” of being pseudo, but in the year since Blur’s launch, the community had “grown exponentially” and he felt it was time to “share his identity publicly.” ^[6][7]

"At this point, Pacman is synonymous with my own identity, and the name is much easier to pronounce than my IRL name. I'll continue referring to myself as Pacman and using my vtuber for calls. I'm excited to keep building Blur with the community to grow NFTs together!" - Pacman tweeted ^[9]