Hello again! I know what you’re thinking, “Smitty, I thought you said you were taking a break from Avalore, wtf is this??”

I said I MIGHT take a break. There are actually a few topics I’ve been meaning to write about for a while but haven’t had the chance.

As you probably realized, there’s not much news right now in the community sphere of the ecosystem, so it’s time to spin through some of my filler topics!

The first thing on my list was to do a review of the Twitter timelines of different crypto chains. Fun!

The AVAX Twitter account has been the subject of many discussions in the community, so I wanted to take some time and actually compare it to the accounts of some other projects. Let’s do it!

The Method

Wow!!!! Numbers!!!

Don’t worry your pretty little head about it, I’ll try to shield you guys from as many numbers as possible and distill the results down for you.

My process was pretty simple:

• Read through the last 100 posts on the project timeline (including RTs)

• Assess on a 0-1 scale if the post could be relevant to community like me

That’s it!

For the American Football enjoyers (yes I married a Brit so I have to call it “American” now, very annoying), it’s kind of similar to PFF and has some of the same flaws. Relevancy is obviously a subjective metric for example.

I was trying to be as loose with the relevancy rating as possible. Any tweet that could possibly be seen as relevant to a chunk of people on CT would earn a 1.

Just so we’re on the same page, here are some of the more borderline tweets that got marked as relevant:

Maybe someone is excited to use this new USDS token in DeFi! Personally I’m ride or die with USDC but you never know!

Maybe one of you is hyped to finally be able to trade $NUTP on chain!

So yeah, just stressing again how liberal I was with “relevant.” If it seemed like it could directly be about someone’s onchain experience, it’s relevant.

I also included any post about a meetup, conference, or hackathon as relevant. Maybe people are excited for those! Any sort of generic fluff or meme post was marked as relevant as well.

And of course, here are some examples of posts that were marked NOT relevant:

It would be fun to do this again with more stress on tweets that I personally find relevant, but then the metric just gets even more subjective, and there’s almost no chance I’m willing to read through the AVAX timeline again (foreshadowing).

Ok let’s look at the numbers!

The Numbers

Wow! An honest to goodness chart! Who saw that coming??

I got tired of this after doing it for 4 different chains, but I made it through the only 4 chains I’ve used this year so that seems pretty fair to me. Here are the actual numbers for the true nerds out there—the rest of you can shield your eyes and skip over the next image:

Ok! Interesting!

The elephant in the room is of course the AVAX account. You probably saw this coming if you’ve been following the chain and seen how business-focused it has been recently. Even the 38% relevancy here was carried HARD by RTs of different local Team1 chapter meetups.

Personally I have never really understood the reluctance to make the AVAX Twitter account targeted more towards Crypto Twitter, but over time I have been worn down to believe that all project accounts are run as LinkedIn pages. Turns out they are not!

It also flies in the face of the recent gaslighting campaign of “we can do both institutions and community, stop the theatrics!”

Yes, it’s possible they can do both, but clearly there is a large imbalance right now. I think it’s fair to say that a project’s Twitter account is a microcosm of the project, so that’s where we’re at right now.

The Others

Ok but that’s enough about AVAX! We are exploring multichain now! Let’s talk about some things that stood out about the other accounts.

They were all posting 75-85% of their tweets about things that are relevant to CT. They spend a lot of time highlighting real onchain experiences and the projects that provide them. This makes sense to me, but likely the AVAX team is making a conscious effort to move away from messaging targeted at crypto natives. Growing the pie!

One thing that stood out to me was that MegaETH RT’d a lot less than the other accounts. I actually like this, as it makes that account the only one I would ever consider turning notifications on for. They post much less frequently, but they have more substance and/or relevance.

Maybe it’s not a fair comparison because the MegaETH ecosystem is much younger and smaller than the others, so they have less of an opportunity to RT and obviously more of a focus on CT natives as they try to acquire users.

Base is not a small ecosystem though, and they still managed to have very high relevancy tweets—their RTs were mostly of projects that CT would be interested in. Seems good!

I think my final subjective ranking for these Twitters would be:

Mega → Base → → → Sol → → → → → → → → → AVAX

But who cares what I think! I am not a marketer! Just talking about how much they appeal to me. As we’ve discussed many times, likely the AVAX Twitter account is not intended to appeal to me.

That’s all for this week! Filler article idea #1 complete!

Next week will probably be about AVAX book club or something. If you haven’t heard, we’re reading the Red Rising series now. It’s one of my favorite books so if you are at all interested in SciFi you should pick it up!

We’re moving into our “hobby” era while we wait for things to do onchain. Maybe a new institution will come and give us something fun to do!

Tweet(s) of the Week

Back again! It’s been a stressful week in Smittyland as we tried (and eventually succeeded) to acquire car insurance in the US for someone with an international drivers license. Shout out Geico for being the only company to get it done. If anyone reading this works for Geico, let them know I’m open to a sponsorship. Gotta get the bag somehow!

We’ve had some juice on the timeline this week—most of it more of the same. Community continues to be the problem! Let’s do the news.

Bear Markets Reveal All

What a tweet from Avery, AVAX’s chief emploid. I want to start off by saying that maybe there is a world where this was an innocent fluff tweet about building through the bear. That’s something many people will post about, and is not necessarily targeted or negative.

HOWEVER

Tweeting this after you’ve just finished an incentives program that people are unhappy with, at a time when the community is slowly but surely losing hope, is pretty horrible taste and will obviously lead people to take offense.

Oh, there’s also the fact that after receiving backlash he just doubled down on it:

I can’t really write about this stuff anymore guys, it’s too draining. Pretty much the entire community raged back against tweet, and for good reason. I don’t have a meaningful perspective to add here—it’s just another coin in the “community is the problem” piggy bank.

I feel bad if it wasn’t intended this way, but also maybe think about what you’re posting and don’t double down on it when it seems like it was misinterpreted??

Sometimes it feels like they are intentionally trying to cycle the community away so they can get a new one. Or none at all? I don’t really understand what the endgame is here.

Any other week this would probably be a massive section about why people received this poorly and what it could mean about what’s happening behind the scenes, but I don’t have the energy! Same story different week! We move on.

Return of the King??

Is it time for Nobs and Excel to bring back PointsMarket? Despite Grok mentioning me as part of the team, I don’t really have any insider information for you here.

The PointsMarket era was one of the most active AVAX CT has ever had, and most people remember it fondly. At this point it has taken on an almost mythical glow in people’s memories, and bringing it back would be no easy task.

The current issue with building things on AVAX is that there is just very little reward. The community is so small and hesitant right now, so the upside is extremely capped. Especially for something like PointsMarket, which was never monetized to begin with.

If we use Giraffe’s Avax Bingo as an example, he put a ton of time into that project but the team only made 180 AVAX, which at current prices would be around $1700. This is a high quality project that the entire community was excited for, and even with a 20% rake he was not able to take home more than $2k to split between him and the dev.

It’s tough to commit to building something like PointsMarket in this environment. We can take Chris and XRPant’s project HashCash as an example here too. It swept the timeline and had everyone involved. Even after all their hard work, with everyone participating, the coin peaked around $300k MCap and they will be responsible for it FOREVER.

They are more noble than most, doing it “for the love of the game,” but it’s not reasonable to expect people to take such lopsided risk/reward. Will Nobs and Excel slave over this for basically no reward just for the sake of vibes? We shall see.

I think this is the core of why people were unhappy with the results of Build Games. It seemed like it could have been a program to spark lots of cool projects on chain (ponzis even!), beefing up the “reward” side of building and giving people more freedom to experiment.

There was a point in the process where I was drinking the Kool Aid and thought that when it was over we would even have TOO MUCH to do on chain! 10 ponzis releasing on the same day! Ha!

As it stands, I think the only cool new thing we got out of it was Avax Bingo, and even that had already been helped into profitability by Bears and Salmon’s hackathon.

The rest of the projects that received funding either already existed, or aren’t relevant to most of us. I don’t want to disparage funding good projects that already exist, I just think it was a big missed opportunity on that front.

Shoutout Avax Team1 again here as for the past 6 months the only reward for building anything has been a $5k micro grant from Chimba. It’s a great program, but there’s only so much good will you can build with that.

What is an Ecosystem?

As I’ve said before, I don’t have a ton of energy left for this stuff, but I wanted to briefly follow up on last week’s article as some Labs emploids responded to my section about the ecosystem call being mostly corposlop.

They had various different messages but were all to the tune of this was BD talking to the broader ecosystem or this was explicitly not a community call.

I actually started to think that maybe I was wrong to assume an "Ecosystem Update” would have any relevance to me or the community. Am I the crazy one here??

No! I’m not! This is what a “Head of Ecosystem” does on other chains. Can you picture having an ecosystem call on AVAX where they were discussing how to reward communities in 2026? Hard to imagine.

Can you picture a founder who is in the trenches, responding and posting about memes with the community? Hard to imagine. (To be fair, Emin did this with $JUNIOR and it was awful. Not everything is black and white!)

The fact that I need to waste time trying to define what I mean by “community” and “ecosystem” is a great microcosm of the problems we have today.

I know you’re tired (I am too!) so you don’t have to read that whole post, but suffice it to say this is the 9000th time a Labs employee has asked us to explain “fun” or made some kind of reductive argument about how the community only wants them to buy our bags.

I don’t really blame them though, they exist in a different world than we do so it’s hard to converse on equal footing. They are in the BD trenches, not the onchain trenches, and that’s the lens they view the ecosystem through.

He’s right, the article would be boring without the “constant dramatics.” There would be nothing to write about! I’d just be writing about MyPrize’s new transaction counts every week! Awesome!

It’s even gotten to the point where people from other chains have reached out to me to try to open lines of communication as they see what’s happening here! I’m trying to focus on not being a maxi for one specific chain.

There’s often a gaslighting sentiment that gets pushed along the lines of “AVAX community is always fighting, it’s a bad look for the outsiders.” It was nice to receive some messages from outside our ecosystem from people explaining that they hear what the AVAX community is saying and think it can be better elsewhere.

It’s weird to feel negative even as price is going up—looks like we may even hit a $10 Bingo square today—but this is proof that community sentiment is not about price.

It has never been about price! It’s about feeling supported!! No, I will not explain what that means!!! That’s your job!!!! You can figure it out, I believe in you!!!1!!!!!

Sorry to Bingo enjoyers as I may need a break from Avalore next week. Getting too tilted writing the same stuff a million different times. Article quality is suffering, and I’ve been really busy IRL anyway. Maybe it’s better to let things blow over and come back when (if) morale improves.

Tweet of the Week

Hello my fellow birds! Hope you’ve had a great week of flocking together.

I will be blunt with you guys, I’ve been losing some motivation over the last few weeks here. It’s becoming harder and harder to work up the energy to write these articles as AVAX focus continues to shift away from the things I like.

It’s a shame, because I think behind ETH and SOL, AVAX probably has the next strongest community. It would be cool to see it given the tools to really thrive like it has in the past.

But alas! Giraffe added a Bingo square for me not missing a week of these things, so the show must go on. At least until the end of the quarter! Let’s do the news.

Dom Posts Very Avalabs Tweets

I know this will probably be controversial, but I like Dom! Yes, he got Deep Water Studios some grants back in the day, so I am incredibly biased, but that’s life!

He onboarded some absolute STINKERS, but at least he got some money in the community’s hands and was in the trenches. Back in his time, there was real money being spent on the ecosystem. Now we have…well, we don’t have much.

Anyway, I do NOT like some tweets of his this week, and they perfectly encapsulate the direction Ava Labs is going and why I’m losing motivation so I will include them here.

The above tweet is basically highlighting Labs’ continued focus on KPImaxxing at the expense of funmaxxing. Good! I hate “cool” and “neat” things too! Much prefer sustainable businesses hitting high transaction and user counts!

Then he went on to talk about how the Foundation is basically a VC and is trying to fund apps that will provide returns. This also is a common theme and something we’ve seen play out with Build Games.

It’s just frustrating to keep reading stuff like this. The Foundation’s job should be to try to convince people to come spend time on AVAX, and things that do this will not always be profitable and backed up by a bullet-proof business model.

Some random ponzi could drive much more activity to the chain than a well-thought out RWA business that people don’t want, despite having basically no business plan.

AHHHH I feel like I’m writing the same thing every week! Let’s pause for some positivity, I need a break.

Build Games Postmortem Postmortem

In an attempt to cheer myself (and maybe you?) up, I wanted to highlight some community projects that announced Build Games grants after I finished my last article.

I know the article was pretty negative, and it’s hard to mask my emotions when writing. Yes, of course I was salty that none of the three projects I was helping with got funding. But I don’t want to let that cloud my judgement, so here I’d like to give flowers to some projects that DID get funding that I actually use! Hooray for funding real projects!

I will skip The Grotto because everyone knows that one already and Wrath was on the cover last week so he’s gotten enough screentime.

We Keep Winning

We Keep Winning is a sports betting vault project from Average Andy. Basically, all you have to do is deposit USDC and let his trading algorithms do the work for you. Normally I’m incredibly skeptical of trading bots, but he has been grinding on this for a long time and has been working to find the inefficiencies in the sports betting market.

This is much different than algorithmically trading tradfi/large cap markets as there really are inefficiencies to capture here. So far his vault has given me ~10% return over the last month! Very solid!

Obviously profit is not guaranteed and you should be careful with what you risk, but win or lose it is fun to check what bets the bot is making and have something to root for while watching. Nice work, Andy!

AVAX Bingo

Avax Bingo from Giraffe is currently holding the position of “only thing to do on AVAX” right now. And for good reason!

It’s been really fun to watch the timeline as new squares come into play. Will Snaps be kicked from The Grotto team after posting some anti-Christian tweets on Easter? Will Vanya continue posting selfies at record pace?

It was cool to see everyone commenting “BINGO” when we got inversebrah’d this week, and we even ticked off the “partner with a Fortune 500 company” square! Yay for business!

It’s one of the few fun things we’ve had in a while, so thanks to Giraffe and Polypup for the good execution here.

Kardpay

Bit of a wildcard here, but I saw the Kardpay team got funding as well!

I don’t have a ton to say on this one as I haven’t used the project much, but I did test it and was able to easily get a virtual card, load it with AVAX, and use it to pay for things. A real working product!

The customer support has been great and they’ve answered my DMs promptly, as well as taken on some feedback. Seems like a solid team and a usable product. If you’re in the market for a crypto card, they’ve got you covered.

AVAX Ecosystem Call

Just going to cover this as some of you might have wondered what this call was about. Have no fear! I sat through the whole thing so you don’t have to!

If you’re reading this article and someone asked you to describe what’s going on in the AVAX ecosystem, how would you respond?

You might talk about how people mostly trade tokens on Pharaoh and NFTs on Salvor. You’d mention the recent AVAX Bingo mint and how people are talking about that. You’d highlight some Build Games projects that you use. Maybe you’d even mention that you get your news from Avalore! Shameless plug!

The call was not about any of that, unfortunately. It really just highlighted the differences between what we consider the “ecosystem” and how Ava Labs views it.

At the end of the day, this institutional ecosystem is the one that Labs is focusing on capturing. That is fair—I do think AVAX is positioned well for this. But that’s not our ecosystem, and I’m not really sure what it means for people like us. So far it hasn’t meant much.

The ecosystem call mostly focused on efforts to bring various TradFi concepts and loyalty programs to AVAX, so it really had no relevance to us. It felt like listening to a shareholders meeting for a B2B company, which I guess is what it was.

It wasn’t until 59 minutes had passed (it was an hour long call) that someone asked about how all this stuff will benefit the chain.

The Labs emploid who was speaking at the time (Nahas? Can’t remember) talked about how if we bring enough businesses here, eventually crypto native builders will want to be here too and it will spark lots of new development. They mentioned that these new founders would become the AVAX “KOLs” of the future.

So I guess the thought is that if we onboard enough sports teams loyalty programs and tokenized credit applications, crypto natives will be excited to build here and share the good word of the AVAX gospel? Maybe.

Surface Level Takes

Not much to say on this one! I guess we’ll just stay hyped for the things that are being built in the background that have yet to be priced in. The market is wrong!

Also Stupifff is not really understanding what an “ecosystem participant” is, as we talked about above. Do you think the Cavs care about AVAX price? Their loyalty program works the same with AVAX at $2 vs $9. Can Meridian still tokenize institutional credit with $3 AVAX? Probably!

Osmo brought up the age old $30M to Coinbase meme again this week, highlighting the price action. We will probably never get transparency into operational expenses, and maybe that’s too much to ask for, but it’s just another thing to add on to the pile.

Yes, these are definitely not all sells, but some of them are. It’s a stark contrast from EthereumFDN, which just this week announced sells of their own. Obviously there are downsides to announcing you’re going to sell vs just hiding it, but at this point Labs/FDN (SEPERATE ENTITIES) have used up most of their good will, and people just assume all transfers are sells. Transparency can’t be worse than that, right? Maybe some kind of retrospective?

That’s all for this week! It’s a bit grim I’m not gonna lie to you, but I’m trying to reflect emotions I’m feeling and seeing on the timeline as well. Maybe I’m overreacting? Do you guys feel this way too?

Personally I’m trying to take a step back from the AVAX “ecosystem.” I’ve muted some chats for a bit and retreated to the comfort of my usual Discords. Let’s sign off with this great tweet from a past AVAX legend:

I most definitely have been an AVAX community member for the last 4 years, but I’m trying to force myself to be more multichain. It’s easy to stick with what you know (the flock), but crypto is so small right now that it’s crazy to put all your eggs in one basket—especially when you are not that basket’s target audience anymore.

Solana recently released a developer bootcamp video, so that’s something I’m going to look into this week as I’ve always been too scared to veer away from EVM. MegaETH will be ramping into some kind of incentives program soon. Even though that chain seems pretty dead right now, that could be worth investigating as well.

I realize there’s a ton of “grass is greener” syndrome here, and most chains are having similar issues, but I think it’s worth giving other places a try.

Would you guys try a different chain if AVAX people started building there? Let me know in the comments!

Tweet of the Week

Hello hello! What a week we’ve had! Build Games had quite an eventful finish as the top 3 winners were revealed shortly before my April Fools Avalore Edition. Yes that was a joke about funding. For those who were unaware:

1. I would never sell out that hard!

2. The community seems to like this article so it would never get funding! (joking! kinda!)

I know I can be a bit inflammatory and crashout on the timeline to farm engagement, but I will try to keep things constructive in here. Maybe we can start a healthy dialogue!

Anyway, let’s dive in. THE Build Games article!

The Good

Let’s start out with some positives because it will get critical later. One undeniable success of the program is that it got people building. People with no experience developing or running projects threw their hats into the ring and went heads-down on some cool shit.

I saw some first-time game devs, some online claw machines, and cool ponzi apps. This is great! That was definitely one of the goals of the program, so on that level we have some positive.

Ok I will probably rip into them and go into more detail about this later, but I just want to say that I think a lot of the good parts of Build Games were probably brought about by Voh and Avery. At the end of the day, I do still believe they are trying to reward community members, and any grant that goes to a recognizable name was probably pushed by them.

I understand why people are frustrated, and believe me I am incredibly frustrated too, but I think the public-facing employees are not really the issue. The source of the problem is that they are two of maybe 5 employees at Labs that care about the average chain users. For everyone else, we are an afterthought.

You can see it all the time in the posts the emploids will make that all have some variation of “We really want to make this the chain for business, and then of course the users will benefit as well.”

I think some of the rage directed towards these public Labs members is warranted, but honestly a lot of it is not. As horrible as it sounds, I do agree that we’re better off with them here. Ok but that’s enough positives! Let’s get to the negatives! We will start small and ramp up.

The Bad

As someone who was in the competition, it was horrible that you didn’t find out if you passed the last stage until 3-5 days before the next stage was due.

By my count, there were 19 days spent in “limbo” waiting to see if you moved on to the next round, while only 16 days of actually prepping for the round. That’s insane! More time in Build Games was spent waiting to be judged than actually working!

You can make all kinds of excuses here, from “you should be wanting to build regardless” to “it’s hard to judge a lot of applicants” but that’s just covering up the unprofessionalism.

Expecting people to be grinding hard on something even if they were eliminated in the last round shows a complete lack of respect for their time. And “it was hard to get through everyone” is a bullshit excuse too. You were optimizing for signups, and then once you got too many of them you had no plan to deal with them in a reasonable time frame? Not great!

The Ugly

Ok buckle up! We’re in the weeds now!

The absolute #1 issue with Build Games and the cause of all the problems is that it was clearly pulled in too many different ways by too many people, and there seemed to be no alignment whatsoever on the goals of the competition.

Even from the beginning, the question was asked, “What kinds of projects should be in Build Games?” And the answer was always, “Everyone!” Ponzis, one man teams, new projects, old projects, large businesses, DeFi, institutional, everyone was eligible. This lack of focus was probably representative of different team members wanting different things.

For example, I have a strong memory of listening to Voh on a space right after Build Games was announced saying something like “Oh yeah, I love a good ponzi we will for sure be looking for those.”

Then, after reassuring and pushing Kieks to submit a ponzi for the competition, I ask about ponzi flywheels in the telegram and get the above message laughing at me from one of the admins.

The reality is that there was never much space for ponzis in Build Games, and as a result I have a ton of egg on my face now for trying to convince people that there was.

Maybe they shouldn’t have publicly bent over backwards to say this hackathon is different than the others and more community focused, then make the winner a project that the community is not even eligible to use? I mean it’s not rocket science.

This notion of bringing in businesses that bring in users was a common theme from the public-facing members of Ava Labs, but was completely turned on its head when most of the winners are products that 99% of the people on chain won’t be using.

And they didn’t even really try to hide this! In the very post they made asking people to support the projects on socials, they didn’t even tag the projects twitters!! Then when asked why not, they said they didn’t want people to harass the projects???

Avery likened AVAX to a city, saying they were going to bring businesses to revitalize the downtown area and get traffic flowing again. Then what they’ve done is bring in some 9-5 office spaces while scaring away all the bars and restaurants.

That’s a bit of a hyperbole, as there are some predictionslop and TCG products in there, but those are kind of a dime a dozen these days and it’s hard for them to really standout.

Overall, it feels like there were two teams of people communicating about Build Games with completely different goals.

Nothing highlights this dichotomy more than my personal experience with getting a grant from Build Games.

On April 1st, I got this message from someone at AvaLabs about getting a grant for Build Games. Exciting!

About 10 minutes later, I was added to a group chat with Labs people to discuss the grant.

10 minutes after THAT, I received a Twitter DM from someone else at AvaLabs telling me “Sorry, after due diligence your project was flagged by the larger review team as ineligible for a grant.”

????

Honestly I thought it must be an April Fools joke, but no, this is really the flow that happened! I was a grant recipient for all of 20 minutes.

This is the core of the issue. My Build Games project was a small utility add to Avalore (will launch next month), and some Labs employees probably just wanted to use this opportunity to get Avalore in general some funding. Cool!

However, as mentioned above, not many people at Labs actually care about this kind of thing, so likely it was shot down by someone else after review.

I’m upset with how they handled it as that’s clearly a VERY unserious chain of events, but I can’t be mad at them for trying.

In the end, the main mistake was believing this would be something other than just Codebase-lite (it wasn’t). They should have continued to shovel funding to AI unlearning software and institutional credit infrastructure behind the scenes like they always do. Editor’s note: Hilarious that I tried to pick the most ridiculous projects for my April Fools article and one of them got second place!

So What Now?

I think the summary is that this Build Games program played out mostly how everyone thought it would. Wrath outperformed expectations a bit, but it was easy to predict that they would try to lift him up and show that this competition was different.

And in the end maybe it was! More community people got funding than usual for a Codebase-style program. Maybe 10% of the money is going to community goods vs 0%. Improvement!

I do feel a bit demoralized. I was willing to drink the Koolaid about how this time would be different, but now I just look stupid for fighting fud from my friends as the winner is a project we can’t even use.

By the way, there’s too much hate going to the winning project—the second place one makes just as little sense, if not even less. And ESPECIALLY the third place project!

Not all grants are finalized yet (LOL, see above) so maybe my experience is the exception not the norm and we will find out more community projects got funded than it seems. Possibly even more community grants will come out in the next few days and the narrative will switch. Awesome!

For now, I think public facing employees will probably get more hate than they deserve for this outcome from the community. However, the fact remains that they tried their best to make it community-inclusive and this is the result we got. It does not give me much hope for the future for Avalore readers on this chain.

Everyone is making sure we know that Voh is basically the only one in our corner. Pretty dire. I don’t agree with her tone a lot of the time (don’t want to gas her up too much!) or the attempts to police what people tweet, but the fact remains that this is really all we’ve got.

What Can Happen

I want to end with this tweet from willdev to show the strength of supporting the community.

It’s funny, if you talk to any AvaLabs employee about the memecoin program, they’ll talk about what a massive waste of money it was and how it’s just punting millions away until the music stops.

If it weren’t for this program, there is zero chance Avalore would exist as I would have left the chain long ago, and I’m guessing a lot of you readers would have as well.

Instead, people have stuck around and reinvested a lot of their money and time here. You can say the program was inefficient or shortsighted or whatever, but I think the ecosystem today would be even more of a ghost town without the presale/arena launcher era.

And no, I’m not trying to say that people are only happy if they’re buying our meme coins. Don’t strawman me! All I’m saying is that any sort of incentives program is judged against that bar.

Is Build Games better for the community than spending $1M on community tokens?

As it stands, I’m feeling bad for the people that took the “Avalore every week” square on AvaxBingo because I’m not sure how much longer I can do this. (Btw, you have 24 hours left to mint your Bingo cards! Go mint some!)

You think I want to be writing these longform articles on the latest reason why the community is upset? No! I hate this serious bullshit. I just want people in charge to use common sense so that I can meme with the crew about Brando or Fish or whoever.

Throw us a bone every once in a while! Give the lads something to be bullish about! There’s not even grifters here anymore cause there’s nothing to grift!

I’m tired of trying to walk the lines between constructive criticism and peacekeeping and crashing out. It took a lot of effort not to full crashout this week!

In the end, the community will think this article was too nice (it was), and Labs will think it was too mean (definitely not). This shit is exhausting and no fun! Let’s all just agree to make good decisions moving forward. Ok? Ok.

Tweet of the Week

Hello Avalanche enthusiasts!!! It’s a great day to be on a great chain. I am very pleased to announce that the team at Avalanche FDN has offered to sponsor our weekly newsletter!

Gone are the days of slaving over my keyboard every Thursday night/Friday morning for free. Gone are the days of constantly monitoring AVAX CT for relevant tweets for no pay. Gone are the days of paying Frogwell in Discord subscriptions to rush out a cover on Thursday after the narrative shifts.

This is a business now!

My AVAX overlords have agreed to keep things mostly the same, except with three minor changes:

1. The article will now be released on Wednesday instead of Friday. This better aligns with their “AVAX Community” weekly meetings so now they can pay me to do community research.

2. I must insist that everyone pronounce this newsletter “Ahvalore,” both in your heads and out loud. Go ahead, try it now. This article is called Avalore. Ugh I can tell you didn’t pronounce it correctly. Remember it’s like “Avalanche.” “Ahvalore.” We’ll work on it.

3. I report directly to a board of Kevin, Avery, and Voh, and they have final approval over what I can say here. They’re all pretty reasonable though so I think you’ll barely notice any changes!

Ok, that’s everything! Let’s do the Avalore Dump™ Sponsored by AVAX!

Chain Activity at All Time Highs

As we move further into 2026, activity on AVAX continues to climb. Daily transaction numbers are up around 10x from this time last year and showing no signs of slowing down!

It’s great that after we’ve spent so much time on this chain contributing to its vibrant community, other people are beginning to take notice and flock here in droves. This increased activity has not led to a ton of positive price action, but these things tend to lag behind. Not financial advice, but it seems like this is one of those times where we are ACTUALLY early.

One cheerful community member, Zedi, has been chronicling the increase in transaction counts daily. MyPrizeUS has led the way with a flurry of activity, onboarding hundreds of thousands of new users to the chain.

Some great work by the BD team to get this deal done! Looking forward to the next few months as we keep this momentum rolling and those MyPrize users get more active within the larger AVAX ecosystem.

Despite this huge increase in activity, transaction costs remain staggeringly low! AVAX is about 49x more efficient than Solana for transferring tokens, even with this high usage! This is truly the Golden Age for our beloved red coin.

Build Games is a Huge Success

The list of the top 23 finalists in Build Games was released! If you want you can read the full post here.

There are some really strong candidates in that field, and I think it’s safe to say that the competition will be a massive value-add to our ecosystem.

But the job’s not finished! It’s now our job to play around with these projects and welcome this influx of builders with open arms. I’ll just list out a few projects that I’m personally excited to try:

Ammo Markets

Ammo markets is a marketplace for trading tokenized ammunitions. I’ve always wondered why nobody had bothered to put bullets on the blockchain yet, so I was really excited to see this one make it through to the finals!

AVAX is for tokenization, so this seems like a really great fit. I’ve got some 9MM rounds that I’m holding tokenized shares of right now, and if (when) an insurrection starts developing, I look forward to redeeming them for physical bullets. Hopefully someone will tokenize a gun soon so that I can get one of those as well.

Forg3t

Forg3t Protocol is building for a future where people want verifiable, on chain evidence that their data has been removed from a specific AI model. Regulations like GDPR require companies to prove that they have removed all personal data, and Forg3t is building the framework for showing that proof.

At this point, Claude knows everything about me. I don’t like that! I’m excited for a future where I can tell it to remove all my data, and then verify that process on an AVAX L1 like the good lord intended.

Looks like they were originally planning on building their own chain, but I guess they’ve come around to an AVAX L1 now. Why not? They’re so cheap! They’ve been building and brainstorming with Grok since July 2025, so they must have something really great cooking. Editor’s note: They took second place! Well deserved! Can’t wait to play around with this one.

Dhahaby

Dhahaby is poised to be the number 1 place to get loans against your gold and other jewelry. I hold a lot of my wealth in gold bars, so I’m really excited to have those as more liquid assets and be able to borrow against them on AVAX!

They posted that they were launching soon in December of 2024, so that means they’ve had over a year to really hone their product and I look forward to becoming a daily user.

It looks like as of April 2025, they also moonlighted as an AI Fraud Detection Company, so you can be sure that your valuables are safe with them.

Those are my personal top 3 Build Games finalists! There are lots of other good projects involved, so I encourage you all to go through the list and try them for yourselves. Let me know in the comments which projects you want to use!

That’s all the news I’ve got for this week! Please make sure to be on the lookout for discounted Summit tickets as those should be available soon. Looking forward to seeing you guys there and catching up on our various business-related activities.

Thanks again to the Avalanche Foundation for sponsoring this article, and I look forward to seeing you next week on the Avalore Dump™ Sponsored by AVAX!

Tweet of the Week

It’s been a busy week for me, so to be honest I don’t have my usual patience to give you some whimsical, informative, foreshadowing introduction here this time.

Let’s just dive inside the zoos news.

Insider Trading??

Nobs had a nice little mini-crashout earlier this week about insider trading. Thank you Nobs! More people should crash out! Be like Nobs!

Anyway, Nobs alleged that people with early information accumulated a ton of KET for cheap to sell into the FDN bids that they knew were coming.

The crashout was triggered by this insider dumping a ton of tokens even this week, draining 40% of the remaining KET LP. Well, who could do such a thing? Who would know that the FDN was going to bid KET ahead of time???

Why, a Foundation employee of course!

Honestly I think insider trading is unavoidable. If you knew that the FDN was about to buy 8 figures of KET, it would be hard not to buy some and sell into that. But in the words of Ruxin from The League: “You had to rob the THIRD liquor store?? Just go to one! I stole a Kit-Kat last week! Nobody knows, just keep it small!”

Just buy up an extra allocation and offload it for mid 6 figs like a normal person! Don’t sell TWELVE MILLION DOLLARS worth of the coin! Keep it small!

Now of course people will probably say “You can’t prove it’s a FDN employee” and you’re obviously right, but people I trust say there’s a link. It’s also not surprising at all. You’re telling me the same people that shoehorned Gecko Inu into a memecoin rewards program are insider trading??? SHOCKING.

This is also nothing new. For those of you who were active in the days of FDN buying memecoins (ancient times, I know), it’s possible you had a setup tracking the FDN buys as they did not make any effort to hide them.

However, one Hateful discord took things a bit further, and after inspecting the FDN buys they found some wallets that were consistently buying the same tokens a minute or so before the FDN.

Tactical Retreat, being the optimistic guy that he is, posited that perhaps North Korean hackers had infiltrated the FDN process and figured out about the buys before they happened. The channel was then named accordingly:

I’m personally more of an Occam’s Razor guy myself, so I’d be inclined to think it was someone associated with FDN in some way.

Interestingly enough, after the wallets were reported to the FDN, the “insider” activity stopped! Maybe they closed off the North Korean’s access! Good work!

This next bit is exciting so I will bold the run-up:

AN UNDISCLOSED SOURCE HAS GIVEN US SOME INFORMATION ON THIS TOPIC

We have sources!!!! We’re like a real news company now!!!11!!!

Anyway, a source that will remain anonymous reached out to me and told me that employees were actually fired/let go due to insider trading a while ago. They would not give me names of course, but it sounds like it could have been some people who “stepped down” last year as FDN transitioned to new leadership.

Hopefully it’s water under the bridge now, and we will have no more PvFDNEmploids moving forward. If you’re reading this, Matias, just keep your insider trading small! If it means there will be tokens to trade again, we’re cool with it!

Ferdy Sword

For those who haven't noticed, VQ has actually been grinding a ton on the FerdyFlip (sorry, FerdyBet) project!

The site was shut down a while ago but has since been re-opened and some new games have been released by VQ and his 5 Claude agents.

One of the games involved re-skinning “flip” as a fighting simulator:

This might look familiar to you if you are French and therefore a heavy user of the Capy Sword project!

People (me included) were quick to point out these similarities, and eventually baited the Capy founder to speak on the situation.

His post was long, but the relevant part is that he, like so many others, blames the “cabal.” This line of reasoning is frustrating on a few fronts, so let’s speedrun why this makes me angry:

1. There is no cabal. There are different friend groups and communities that support similar founders because they have built up trust over many years. If nobody in a group can vouch for you, they probably won’t blindly trust you.

2. Lack of support wasn’t because of lack of bribes, it was because many people came to the same conclusion that the token was being run poorly. The initial valuation was way too high (above BANDS at the time) and the team’s projections required $50k of volume per week. Many thought this was insane (currently has done around $80k over the last two months and dropping) so they stayed away.

That’s all I’ve got on this one! I think there’s just a lack of introspection here. Maybe the French community is too much of an echo chamber? Idk. Vive!

Team1 USA First Events

The newly established Team1 USA ran it’s first events this week! I can’t speak to the others, but the NYC one was fun and Vanya did a great job planning it. Yes, she has a gun to my head right now, thanks for asking.

Honestly I like these events because, at risk of sounding VERY mean, going to them is a bit like going to the zoo—there are so many weird people to observe and interact with. No shame to them! I’m weird too! I’ll highlight some of my favorite moments here. Hopefully they don’t read this (seems impossible).

One person traveled an hour and a half to this event without knowing anything about AVAX. Onboarding! I asked him what his experience with the chain was, and he mentioned that he ran a project a while back and looked for an AVAX KOL to do campaigns with.

He went with longtime AVAX lord and savior, Jesus Martinez! I asked for some details about the project, but I was shocked to hear it’s not around anymore. He seemed like a nice guy though!

My favorite person at the event approached us with his hood up (it was a dark, inside bar) and was excited to talk about why he thinks Solana has won the “blockchain wars.” It’s actually simpler than you think!

He says it’s because humans are animals (hence the zoo metaphor above) with basic needs. Solana hacker houses apparently had FULL SIZE candy bars, while other events skimped out with mini candy bars. Because of this, he thinks that people naturally flocked to Solana over other chains. Very insightful! This Team1 event actually had mini-tacos, so not a great sign for AVAX’s future.

He was also quick to show off the chain around his neck, which had two golden squares on it. Do you get it??? It’s a block chain!!!!1!!! Apparently this chain signifies his presence in the largest cross-chain DAO in crypto today (didn’t catch the name, sorry).

He also said that he doesn’t go to events unless he gets flown out and paid for. Maybe I’m angering the crypto Illuminati here? Go easy on me please, I’m just a peasant.

That’s all for the news this week! Build Games is reaching its thrilling conclusion—probably we will discuss that in more detail next article.

Also a little birdie told me that Avax Bingo will be minting this Friday (today?) so keep an eye out for that and we will talk about it next week as well. I love having content in the pipeline! So exciting! See you on the other side.

Tweet of the Week

Happy Friday! We opened donations last week, and as of writing we have had nearly 200 cover mints! I can’t believe it! Thank you guys so much, seriously. I never envisioned we would get anywhere near that number.

Special shoutout to Voh, Chimba/Team1, LHB, and HopHopHoppin for minting all 31 (!) covers! You guys are crazy. Seriously, you may want to see a doctor.

Now that the exit scam is complete, I don’t have to try anymore! This will be my first article in the “low effort” era.

Kidding! There wasn’t much going on this week though so it will be a shorter article. Let’s get into it.

Build Games Round 3 Culling

It sounds like we jumped down to ~120 projects from the ~400 that were left at the end of Stage 1. Honestly at this point I’m just ready to see who the projects that get funding are—there’s not much to say about the competition until it’s over.

I’ve seen some examples of projects get cut that I know people put a lot of effort into, so I wanted to highlight some of them before we move on:

My lovely wife was working on a sourdough-themed ponzi (sorry, gamefi flywheel) project that got the axe this week. I still think it’s really cool and am hoping she continues. To be fair, she was having some second thoughts anyway. Running a ponzi is scary! People will be mad when it collapses (it always will) and there’s very little reward.

Some kind of guaranteed funding would have been nice so she didn’t have to rely on selling the token/skimming from presale to get her money’s worth, but obviously I have some bias here.

Make sure to message her and tell her she should still try to launch and you won’t be mad at her based on token price! Words of encouragement!

Mocket has been pulling daily 15 hour shifts working on his Flesh Nuggets game. Personally I’m not such a big indie gamer (sorry Wrath), but this has more effort than most of the games I’ve seen so I wanted to shout it out here.

He’s working on a Binding of Isaac style roguelike, and you can play the demo here. Hopefully he keeps working on it!

I put out a post yesterday trying to bait out some more projects but honestly I didn’t get many replies!

There were two separate token launchers that responded (probably no market for these currently!) and I know that Frogwell’s secret Avalore project got chopped as well. Apparently his Luma free trial expired before the judges could click his MVP link so it was deleted. Hate to see it! Should have used YouTube!

Overall I don’t have a ton of complaints. Once this is over I’m going to try to test all the winning projects and review them so you don’t have to! Then we can fully assess the impact of the program. Exciting!

Nahas Speaks With the Peons

John Nahas and Voh held a call to take some questions from members of the community this week and I was there! Avalore media pass!

It was a lot of yapping so I don’t have a ton to report, but it was cool for an executive employee to interface with the community on any level at all, so thank you for that! My main takeaways are that Nahas’ office has beautiful lighting and that Andy takes calls sideways in a spaceship orbiting Mars.

Nahas mentioned that he wants to see the AVAX ecosystem flourishing again. I asked him what that means, and the first thing he said was that he wants to see new defi primitives get developed on AVAX. He also mentioned that “success” to him would mean AVAX having 5-7 strong new native apps over the next year.

Another thing he said was that he doesn’t like KPIs, which was news to me! There are some KPI non-believers at the company! We must cherish them!

It seems like this type of call might become a more regular thing, so please feel free to send any questions you want asked and I can try to get them in.

Summit NYC!

The AVAX Summit location and time have officially been announced! Tickets have started being sold (I think, I didn’t make it past the 20 question form to verify this) so it’s all confirmed now. See you there?

I can’t believe this is getting a whole section! There’s no interesting news this week! AHHHHH

I’m just gonna end it here! Maybe I missed some news as it’s been a busy week for me. We got married a second time (American immigration doesn’t care about European weddings) and my dad had surgery (he’s fine!) so maybe I missed some things?

Animoca invested in AVAX or something? More institutions to buy our bags? Idk what it means.

I’m sure Wrath will link me 9000 posts of his that I didn’t cover this week. He got a whole section last week! That’s enough exposure for the month!

Please make more drama next week, thank you.

Tweet of the Week

GM fellow business chain enthusiasts! Heads up, I will be forced to mention The Gro*to at some point this week. Just want to give a trigger warning for those of you who have adverse negative reactions to grungy indie game projects.

Before we begin, we need to do some housekeeping. You may have noticed that this is on the news.avalore.xyz subdomain! We’re freeing up avalore.xyz to house some small tools and projects we’re working on for the community. More on that soon.

For now it only has a ‘Donate’ page. I was finally bullied into making one! If you feel inclined, you can go to https://www.avalore.xyz/donate to mint your favorite Avalore covers for one AVAX each!

Let’s do some news!

Wrath Grift Launches On Time

Trigger Warning: Gro**o content

Congrats to Wrath on minting another NFT collection! He doesn’t have enough gritty images in his universe, so I’m glad we now have 250 more of them!

All jokes aside, it’s cool to see the chain excited about things, and this mint definitely got the people involved. Good on The Gr***o team for giving us something to do. And we can even send them to work for points or something? And they come with a game or some kind of 3D model? I still don’t know what’s going on over there, but they’re definitely doing things.

I’ve already seen a bunch of them PFP’d on the timeline—shout-out Voh for changing to one and being community aligned. That’s a really nice way to show support (more on that soon). I can’t tell any of you apart now though so I will assume you’re all Wrath.

Avalabs Supporting However They Can!

I’ve wanted to write about for a while, and it’s a slow week so let’s dive in a bit here.

This is very common actually, where AvaLabs will notice a project is doing well and ask how they can support it. They’ve even reached out to me about this newsletter! They are becoming increasingly involved with CT which can only be a good thing. They notice when things are getting hot and are eager to fan the flames. Great!

Now here’s where I will be A BIT negative. Not crashing out! Just trying to push the conversation forward!

The main resource that AvaLabs/FDN has in abundance that these projects need is money. I’m sorry! That’s just how it is! Support = money. This is rarely what they mean by support though. Usually their support is in the form of “amplification” or “GTM classes” or “marketing workshops.”

I don’t want to discourage this, because obviously it’s better than nothing, but the reality is that stuff is not always helpful.

For example, the main account will sometimes RT my articles. It’s nice to feel supported! I will get a lot more impressions, but the engagement remains mainly the same (a couple more likes/comments from bot accounts) and the readership definitely remains consistent at around 300 views a week regardless of whether or not they RT.

Also as an aside, I don’t understand why exposing a good project on your chain to your audience should be seen as a favor or “support” for that project. Is it not mutually beneficial? Shouldn’t the main AVAX twitter be highlighting cool things happening on the chain anyway?

Over and over again I see people build cool shit and have to answer these “how can we support” messages and I just don’t get it.

“How can we support Bears and Salmon?” You can juice up their prize pool! The project made around $25k TOTAL and is paying Bear’s Den winners $20k of that! The 5k from the Team1 grant went to this!

“How can we support Avalore?” You can help me pay Frogwell for making 31 covers for free!

“How can we support Pointsmarket?” How about some small airdrop like you did for Retro9000 voters? Do you know how insane people would have went for that??

And to be clear it doesn’t always have to be BuY mY tOkEn, but injecting money into the project in any way is how you support. LP rewards/liquidity, sponsoring airdrops, juicing prize pools, even paying the team with some form of retroactive grant (like Team1 micros) is great! If you reward a team with a $5k grant, that’s $5k less that the team needs to make from their users.

Ok rant over! It’s cool that they’re trying, and AvaLabs is way more involved in CT/community than we’ve seen in the past. We appreciate it! I don’t want to completely dismiss the effect that a PFP change or tweets from employee accounts can have on a project. Just wanted to get this off my chest! It’s a slow week so I gotta bait engagement somehow!

More Grant Stuff!

Queue “Another One Bites the Dust” music! Who could have seen this coming?? Project that nobody used has to shutdown because nobody wanted it!

I don’t really know what they did, only that some suits were calling it a competitor to The G****o less than 6 months ago. So I guess it’s some kind of gaming thing? Whatever it was, it’s gone now. And in such a way that they needed to turn off replies on their tweet. Yikes!

Anyway, there was some good copy pasta in there—if you want you can read the full tweet here. I will now provide you the abridged version:

We wanted a potential buyer to give our community benefits but we had nothing to give in return. We couldn’t find someone to do that for free, so we’re just going to end the project ourselves.

The reason we had nothing to offer potential buyers is because we spent too much money, managed the treasury poorly (we kept it all in AVAX! Oopsie!), and had no PMF so we have nothing left.

Fun stuff!

In other grant related news, chain researchers Zedi and Tactical Retreat took a look at what contracts were being used by projects for this upcoming Retro9000 C-Chain round and found some interesting things listed! Remember, projects are receiving funding based on the gas burned by their contracts.

Zedi found out that AAVE is claiming USDC.e and EURC contracts as their own, and Tac saw that Blackhole has, amongst their 56 (!) contracts, listed WAVAX! I didn’t realize the Blackhole team was behind Wrapped AVAX! Very cool!

Seems like the Retro team has been responsive and has since removed these contracts, so this is less of a knock on them and more about these projects either not understanding the rules or trying to squeak out some more money without people noticing. Either way, not great!

Obligatory News for the Suits

Let’s end by rapid-firing news for our corporate overlords. We can play ball here! I can be a good little worker bee!

Grayscale opened up trading for $GAYVAX $GAVA, its AVAX ETF product this week! The accounts swapped logo coloring with the AVAX account taking on the dreary, muted colors of the Grayscale logo while the Grayscale account took on the vibrant red that we know and love. Very cute!

Mastercard launched its “Crypto Partner Program” and we were included! Well, the emploids at Ava Labs were included at least. It sounds like the program is a large committee of companies that will discuss what the future of payments looks like with the Mastercard team.

This means Ava Labs is officially a top-85 blockchain company. Yay for us! Have fun in that 85 person Signal chat, Emin!

Team1 launched a fancy new Team1USA_ branch! Gold checkmark! Honestly it was news to me that there was no USA branch of Team1. Seems like the largest AVAX market so it makes sense to have one! Now we do!

And last but not least, we can finally buy memecoins with our AVAX—we just need to bridge to Solana to do it.

That’s all the news for this week! I wasn’t sure we’d have enough to write about this time but we ended up getting there. Definitely would not have been wanting to do daily posts this week. Chalk one up to the weekly format!

Tweet of the Week

GM fellow AVAX enjoyooors! We’ve had a nice week of crashing out. It felt good to get some of that out of my system!

However, now I have hit the approved maximum length of crashout, so it’s time to crash back in! Mostly.

To start, one thing I wanted to answer is a question I got last week:

Why are you here if you’re always complaining??

The answer is in the cover piece of this article. I’m here because I think this community is full of the smartest, most creative people in the space. We invited a lot of these people to our wedding, and our friends Frogwell and Goose worked to make us the above image of our Dev and Draw community.

Those people are why I’m here! We talk every day, and they have become a large part of our life. I want to succeed on AVAX with them!

Ok, that’s enough sap! Let’s do news!

Post-Crashout Clarity

Overall feedback from the crashout article was pretty encouraging. I’ve had some good conversations with community members—seems like a lot of people are upset about the same things I’m upset about. We’re united!

I also had a bunch of conversations with Avalabs employees, and they appear to be taking this stuff to heart. I don’t want to get people’s hopes up because for now it’s mostly talk, but I do believe that our concerns are being addressed.

I thought this post from Kevin was particularly interesting, as it implies that they actually do care about us lowly AVAX CT plebs. Again, it’s just talk for now, but I have gotten so many of these types of responses that I am willing to give them some SMALL benefit of the doubt.

These things won’t change in a day, but having the CIO of the Foundation respond to the crashout article is a sign that we are being heard! Even if all his responses included some variation of the phrase “thanks for the color.”

His original question about what “fun” means was initially troubling to me as it sounded like we were destined to try to figure out what kinds of meaningless KPIs signal “fun” and then inevitably settle on some poor, corpo-pilled program to boost them.

HOWEVER, if we consider Kevin’s tweet about tracking community replies and sentiment, I feel pretty good that they can use that to figure out when we’re having fun.

More Grant Shenanigans

We had some good grant drama this week! I’m on my post-crashout, let’s-be-friends arc so I will avoid crashing out here again over this!

Basically, this Artery Chain (I only know them from the Play Memoria presale that speedran to zero) announced that they were shutting down since their grant money ran out. Not a good look for anyone involved!

This threw salt on the wound as we were already in our crashout arc, and community members took to Twitter to complain about the kinds of teams who receive grants.

There are sooooo many examples of teams being “onboarded” for a grant and then leaving or not contributing anything, and people are tired of it. I think all people want is for more grant money to go to teams/projects that we actually know and use.

I understand that the chain is allowed to want products here that are not necessarily targeting us CT users, but it feels supremely imbalanced.

Nobs even started an ACP to try and funnel funding to more community aligned projects and developers. Go vote on it here so we don’t have future announcements of projects doing nothing and then shutting down when they stop getting funding!

To sample this behavior, I had a look at the most recent cohort of Retro9000 recipients:

Now I’m sure you’ve unfortunately heard of The Grotto, and I have heard Paradise Tycoon thrown around as well, but I wanted to look at the other 4 projects.

I didn’t do much research honestly. I literally just went to their Twitter pages and clicked through to each of their websites.

Uh oh! This one didn’t even have a working website! Keep in mind that this is a RETROACTIVE grant, so it’s in theory based on work that they’ve already done.

This really angered me and confirmed my suspicions at the time!

However, I am post-crashout now, so I am willing to admit that maybe they are doing work that I just don’t know about. Maybe it’s a cool project and maybe I just unluckily tried to access their website during a brief outage that just so happened to be right after funding was announced.

Sarnavo seems to think so! And he was quick to reply to 500 posts once they put the website back up! Find someone who loves you as much as Sarnavo loves the Turf Network team.

Anyway, this grant stuff will be a touchy subject moving forward and probably something that people will be tracking. We’re not asking for much though! We just want future grants going to things that seem like real projects!

Speaking of future grants…

Build Games Round 1 Culling

Build Games emails have gone out and the number of projects has been culled down to around 400. This is actually pretty cool, because it means that even if every single project got funding, they would get $2.5k on average. Not bad!

But of course with denials for any kind of program, there were some nice crashouts on the timeline!

I will say this—cutting from 2000 projects to 400 is hard, and good projects are bound to get cut. Also, I think the process is doubly hard since a lot of applicants were applying with projects that already existed.

A lot of those existing builders are the ones who are crashing out the hardest. People who have been pouring their hearts into projects feel they are being overlooked. I asked Voh about this a bit, and she had this to say (yes I cleared permission to post this publicly! I respect my sources!!!11):

I respect this! If a project has been around for a while and has no motion or buzz, odds are pretty good that a grant won’t change that.

AVAX is small, and if you’re not able to get your project out there in our community I think some self-evaluation needs to be done. Either you have too much onboarding friction or people are just not that excited about it. It’s tough to hear, but once you figure this out you can start solving the problems and make things better. Money likely won’t be the solution!

Voh also threw in this chart (and gave me permission to post it!) which I found interesting:

So it looks like they’ve got a nice selection of projects from a very wide spectrum.

Part of me wonders if they will overcorrect here and we’ll end up with 93 funded ponzis (sorry, “gameFi flywheels”) launching on March 27th. Maybe we can stagger these things somehow!

I am still remaining hopeful that Build Games can be very net-positive for the eco, even if I have reservations. Again, we won’t know until it’s over! But I have post-crashout hope!

Chef PhillipAvax1

I don’t know what to say here really, but we got some incredible copypasta from this guy who has launched and rugged multiple arena coins. Including it for lore purposes:

He didn’t leave, by the way. Shockingly he still has “AVAX” in his twitter name and posted this less than 9 hours later:

Let’s check on that Lucy coin, it seems like it could be a real winner if it brought Phillip back to AVAX:

Well that’s all I’ve got for this week! Cautiously optimistic that I will not need to write another crashout edition for at LEAST a month.

As an aside, Frog and I are both working on separate Avalore-branded projects for Build Games. We’ll need to change from just a simple Substack sometime in the next few weeks to accommodate this, so don’t freakout if this newsletter moves to something like a news.avalore.xyz subdomain. It’s not a drainer! Well maybe it is. Only one way to find out!

Tweet of the Week

My dearest friends, colleagues, associates, enemies—the time has come. I have written the same shit in this article for MONTHS. I’ve been very reasonable in my feedback (in my extremely humble opinion), I’ve tried to see all sides, I’ve done it all. I’ve been added to different groups with employees, given opinions, offered my time (unemployed btw, infinite time) to help this chain succeed, and nothing has come of it.

All that happens is I get repeatedly told “nObOdY gIvEs GoOd FeEdBaCk” or “yOu JuSt DoNt GeT mArKeTiNg BrO” and I’m tired of it! Fuck the news this week! Time to dump stream of consciousness into an article! I’m crashing out!!! AHHHHHHH!!!!111!!!!!

Avax is for Business

Avalabs has made it VERY clear that their priority is focusing on businesses and institutions. This is relevant in pretty much every piece of marketing they’ve put out recently. It really feels like beating a dead horse here, so I’ll just let an ex-Avalabs employee explain why this bothers us so much:

Every pro-business announcement just drives the knife deeper. They’re focusing on businesses, so they’re not focusing on users. Can they do both? Possibly, but like Eric said there will be very few chains that do both well. The issue is that AVAX doesn’t seem to be prioritizing the users anymore.

Yes, they have not literally said “we don’t want users” as that would be an INSANE thing to put in writing, but they’ve made it clear over, and over, and over again that they are not focused on the onchain ecosystem.

The head of the FDN, Matias, did an interview with Avax Team1 that I found pretty telling. When “community” came up in the interview, it was often taken to mean validators and liquidity providers. This is an incredibly corpo-pilled way to view the community of a blockchain, and I would guess that many people reading this now are not validators of the chain nor are they foreign currency stablecoin LPers.

There’s no mention of the people who show up day in and day out on CT, people minting NFTs, people trading (gasp) memecoins. If “community” to Avalabs is to mean validators and people trading Forex on DEXes, we are simply not part of it.

It seems that at the same time, all blockchains have decided that it’s time for crypto to “grow up.” This is not an AVAX specific problem actually, and we’re seeing the same things on Solana, Base, pretty much everywhere. Everyone who made a shitload of money launching a chain in the last 5 years has decided it’s time for them to change the world and “mature.”

And yes, on all of these chains the community is pissed off. This is doubly frustrating because it’s easy for employees to say “Hey look at that, people on Solana are pissed too! It’s just a global crashout because prices are down!”

That being said, the crashouts are NOT from the fact that price is down. Let me say this again:

PRICE IS NOT WHAT IS BOTHERING PEOPLE. WE ARE AWARE PRICES ARE DOWN ACROSS THE BOARD.

Yes, AVAX is down more than other tokens, and would be $45 right now if it were only down as much as other chains, but that’s not the point! The point is that all messaging has made the users of the chain feel like they do not matter. Let me make this part big because I think this is the core issue:

If you have a browser wallet installed, you are probably not the target audience anymore!

That is how it feels!!

Crypto is entering its mature era, so it’s time to leave those silly NFT minters and memecoin traders behind. Let’s focus more on ETF buyers and people who will hold our token on an exchange. Let’s inflate our metrics to attract taxi drivers and “Technology” enthusiasts. Let’s get people like my friend Max, who sent me this text last week:

The target audience is now people who simply want to “invest in solano and the chain jp morgan uses.” I won’t pass any value judgements here—Cardano exists solely off the backs of these kinds of people. Maybe AVAX can as well. But whether this works in the future or not, going in this direction means leaving the on-chain community behind.

Literally all people want is to feel like there is some world where AvaLabs has even a small priority on what normal users are doing onchain.

“But Smitty, isn’t Build Games trying to bring more projects onto the chain? Aren’t they trying to help bolster the community?”

I’m glad you asked!

Build Games

Build Games is the epitome of this shift in Avalanche’s direction. Their stated goals are to identify startups that can run profitable, sustainable businesses on chain. I think in the absolute best case scenario, the goal of Build Games is to find the next Polymarket.

Hmm, well Polygon already has the last Polymarket—I wonder how that’s working out for them?

I use Polymarket almost every day, and in research for this article I just learned that the Polygon gas token is not MATIC anymore!!

I’ve spoken with numerous people who actually use the Polygon chain (they were hard to find, but they exist) and all of them seemed to echo the same sentiment—the presence of Polymarket is probably great for the KPIs of employees at Polygon Labs (or whatever the company is called) but it does little for the actual ecosystem.

If you use Polymarket, can you name an NFT project on the chain? Can you name a single token? Have you ever even used another app on the chain??? Probably not!

Onboarding something like that would be the absolute BEST case for Build Games, and even that would likely not effect anything that the readers of this article care about.

I’ve said it in this space before, but there really are two different worlds in crypto. There’s the bubble that Labs exists in where the only things that matter are onboarding businesses and partners to the chain, and there’s our bubble where we just want to have fun and make money in a vibrant ecosystem.

I even posted about this in the Build Games Telegram chat. I was wondering where our fun, ponzi experiments might fit in to this seemingly profit and sustainability focused program. I got the most AvaLabs response possible:

Yes, of course I was joking! Why would anyone hope that this program produces projects that people actually use?? Should have stuck with more RWA/stablecoin focused endeavors!

This really got under my skin, particularly the .eth idiot that clown reacted me—he’s building a web3 boot camp with certificates on chain, a very novel and super unique concept, I’m sure it will onboard many users. Afterwards, I reached out to some other people to see if this is really what Build Games is about.

They responded with things like “that’s just DevRel lol, you can do ponzis.” LOL!!! Silly me expecting the team to be aligned on what kinds of things they were looking for in this program they have been planning for 6 months!! Silly me, as a developer, expecting to get accurate information about a hackathon from Developer Relations!!!! LOL!!!!1!!!

And to be clear, I don’t really blame this DevRel employee. It’s just yet another example of how the people at Labs exist in a different bubble than the rest of us. They don’t use this chain. They’re “Not familiar with the HashCash project, sorry!” They want to onboard things that look good for future partners so that they can recruit bigger partners next time. That’s the real ponzi!

I don’t want to speak too ill of Build Games though since I am still in the program. I won’t bring up the fact that employees were flaunting how they had 2000 participants, only to later say “well actually, getting in didn’t mean anything, it was automatic” when one of them rugged. So are we supposed to be impressed that 2000 people signed up, or are we supposed to not care because the signup was a one-sentence project description that auto approved everyone? It’s just KPIs all the way down.

I also won’t bring up the fact that we’re 10 days away from the phase 2 deadline, but projects still don’t know if they passed phase 1. Too many program acceptances! How could we foresee this!!!11!!!

I definitely won’t talk about how it launched at the same time as a similar community program from Bears and Salmon, a team with about 1000000000000x less funding than AvaLabs. I won’t mention how they didn’t really acknowledge this until people complained, didn’t see these complaints coming, and then their big “support” was announcing a “dual funding” initiative. What is dual funding you ask? Well it seems that this just means that Bear’s Den projects are also allowed to apply for the Build Games program! They can win funding from both!! Wow!!! That’s so generous of them to allow people to apply for both!!!!!11!!!!!

I believe they will be getting a Build Games grant as well, but like everything else it is slow-moving and reactionary. And as far as I know they haven’t received anything outside of a $5k Team1 grant (more on Team1 later).

So What Do We Want?????

We want the same thing we’ve always wanted, Pinky—we want to have fun and make money. This is frequently mistaken for “jUsT bUy My MeMeCoInS” but that’s not it!! THAT’S NOT IT!!!!

WE JUST WANT FUN THINGS TO DO ON CHAIN!!! We want an on-chain ecosystem that feels supported by AvaLabs, not shunned. We want to make money! We don’t want some bullshit program encouraging more bullshit grant hunters from other chains to build some bullshit RWA/stablecoin “sustainable businesses.”

Voh recently said that she “soft shills” AVAX in her Solana spaces. What are you shilling that could have any appeal to people who actually use blockchains?? “Yo guys, come to AVAX, we have the deepest Korean Won liquidity!?!?!”

And don’t give me this “So build it yourself then” bullshit. There’s just not enough users here to build anything profitable. We need incentives that are actually focused on this stuff for people to have any reason to build. I’ve laid out plenty of ideas around this in past articles! Constructive feedback!!!11!!!

I’ve been mocking out a little GambleFi project for a while, and even with 5% rake I could expect MAYBE $10k in participants. That’s $500! I’m better off working at McDonalds!! Why do you think the FerdyFlip site was taken down? It’s back up now because VQ was so bored he doesn’t mind losing money on it.

And also don’t hit me with the “Well we tried getting involved in the ecosystem with memecoins and everyone hated it” company line either. Actually you know what, let’s talk about that too!!!

They Tried Getting Involved with Memecoins and Everyone Hated It

Yes, Voh was probably paid with a Wink allocation to make this post (shoutout ThaDream) but the sentiment here is true. When FDN was buying memecoins it was the most active the chain has ever been.

Yes, a lot of people came over for free money and a lot of them left when the money dried up. But that’s exactly my point! People will go where there is money to be made and fun to be had. Some of these people did NOT leave! I know because I see them in my Discord channels!

But it wasn’t all Kumbaya when this was happening either. People were mad about the approach FDN took here. Actually let me make this part bold because I know a lot of employees struggle with nuance:

PEOPLE ALWAYS LIKED THE IDEA OF BUYING MEMECOINS, THEY WERE JUST FRUSTRATED WITH SOME OF THE EXECUTION!!

Yes!! Obviously people were ecstatic that FDN took an interest in things that were happening on chain!

Believe it or not, it’s possible to run this sort of program without spending damn near ONE MILLION AVAX (yes that’s AVAX, not dollars) on Dani Sesta coins!!!!

And for the new AvaLabs employees just so there’s no confusion here, I’m talking about $LAMBO and $WIFE, tokens that pretty much nobody gave a shit about.

It’s also possible to run such a program without dumping 600k AVAX into $BLACK! Another token that nobody wanted!! Alex Becker sends his regards!

Imagine if more of that was directed into Excel’s Wolfi token! Yes I know they did put money into Wolfi!!! But imagine how much further this massive WIFE/BLACK spend would have went if it was put into a token that the entire community was rallying behind!!!1111!!!! AHHHHHHHHHHH

This is more of an opinion thing, but I think a TON of money was wasted trying to chase high market caps. People are just looking for 10-100x opportunities, there’s no reason to dump tens of millions of dollars into KET trying to force it from 500M to 1B. I guess 1B is better for KPIs! The same could be said later on in the cycle for them trying to push LAMBO to 100M. A much more effective use of money would have been creating multiple 1-10M runners and building a winning culture here.

Also I have to believe there’s a better way to keep the buys secret rather than dumping obvious 2000 AVAX clips into tokens from a custom contract! But that’s not my job!

It did make it easier to sum up the totals though, so thanks for that. I didn’t do much data sanitization here but I think the numbers mentioned in this article should at least be on the correct order of magnitude.

Regardless, this program created the most activity the chain has ever seen, and overall people would kill to have it back! I’m just pointing out that yes some people were frustrated by aspects of it!! Not everything is black and white!!! I’m just trying to give perspective and feedback AHHHH!!!!!11!!!!!!!!!!

But that’s enough on memecoins! Like I said, people struggle with nuance so they will take even the mere presence of this section as proof that the community only wants FDN to buy our memes!!

Speaking of nuance…

Communication!!!!!!

Along with the strong institutional push, the number two thing pissing people off is communication. It’s seemingly impossible to communicate with members of the AvaLabs team without being spoken to like a child.

I get that their job is frustrating, but this is why you get paid??

“Everyone has a bad opinion on marketing,” “This is a stupid thing to say,” “Silly implementation,” these are the kinds of responses people get when they try to voice complaints and make suggestions.

I don’t think it’s just me that sees this, as many other people have said the same thing over and over again.

It seems that they’ve taken this feedback on board now though, so we’ve been hit with a lot of “we understand you’re frustrated and we’re listening” type responses now. That’s great! Now show that you’re listening!

People also frequently complained about the lack of transparency, but I think that is actively being worked on as well. The head of FDN doing an interview on their goals is pretty cool (although I wish they weren’t so focused on stablecoin liquidity!) and more of that will help manage expectations better in the future.

I do want to say I feel bad for the employees like Voh and Kevin and Avery a little. I’m guessing that a lot of the parroting of company lines comes from above. Surely these people that came from Solana would prioritize onchain ecosystem and market to crypto natives more if given the chance? I assume that’s what brought them to the space in the first place? Idk maybe that’s just copium.

The Bright Spots

Ok that’s enough crashing out, I’m losing steam. I want to end this article by talking about the hope. The things that show that maybe there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

First of all, I really attacked the Build Games program earlier but the reality is it’s not done yet. The program will be judged solely based on what it can produce. I think optimizing for the amount of participants is completely meaningless to people reading this article, and I think we have incredible builders on chain and don’t need to be bringing over other extractors, but I still have hope that we will see some fun things come out of this program.

They will probably receive the minimum $5k grants, and they may even be ponzis (much to the dismay of DevRel) but this is a positive outcome! I remain hopeful on this front.

Secondly, I want to shine a spotlight on poor old Chimba. His monthly $5k Team1 grant program seems to be the only thing currently aimed at nurturing the onchain community. I think a lot of this frustration goes away if (when) this program gets more funding and more exposure.

He genuinely seems to care about the community, and is less suit-pilled than any other employee I’ve spoken to. He’s leading lots of discussions with myself and other community members, trying to understand and fix our frustrations. Shoutout Chimba!!

That’s my crashout! I hope you enjoyed!

TLDR

Yes people want price to be higher. Yes it would be nice if FDN bought memes again. But people really are not upset about these things!!!!11!!!

They are upset because they feel like they’re holding a fundraising token for a B2B company and don’t have a reason to be here anymore.

They’re upset because even if the vision of focusing on institutions and businesses is the correct play for AvaLabs, it will mean nothing for the users of the wider AVAX onchain ecosystem. (Insert AvaLabs company line about tokenomics changes fixing this) (Insert lots of doubt here).

I’m personally upset because when I think about throwing another event at the next AVAX Summit, I realize that none of my friends from the last one are planning to come. They’ve either gone to another chain or tuned out crypto completely as they don’t resonate with this new “mature” era. It feels like we’d be hosting a bunch of “Blockchain Manager” type people from small or failed TradFi companies. And Wrathtank.

I’m upset because the same thing is happening across the entire space, and there’s basically nowhere for us to migrate to. People complain about the same shit on Sol and Base. Everyone is getting more “real” and that leaves those of us that are in crypto for fun with nowhere to go. It seems like there should be an opportunity to capture this market!

But I am not a marketer. I am not a decision maker. I am an endangered species—someone whose Rabby wallet defaults to the Avalanche blockchain.

Tweet Project of the Week

Luana vibecoded this anonymous crashout app that seems pretty cool!

Don’t want be like me and crashout publicly, potentially harming relationships with people that decide your financial future?

Crashout anonymously on her site here.

But also Tweet of the Week

GM fellow AVAX enjoyoors! Another week in the Dorito mines. It feels like there’s not too much happening on the timeline these days—maybe everyone is busy watching Olympic Games? Sorry sorry, THE Olympic Games. Not sure how many times I can make that joke but it still makes me laugh. And it’s my article! You’re stuck here! Let’s do the news.

Hashcash Makes Cash

I’ve never seen this guy before but it’s giving me such great 2021 vibes I just had to include it. Shoutout James Pelton (is he still around?).

Anyway, since my article last week, HashCash really flourished—as of now it has topped around 300k MCap. If we use the standard conversion rates, 300k on AVAX is basically 300M on Solana so this is what the kids call a “runner.” Right now it’s down a bit, but it’s still 3x higher than it was when we spoke last Friday.

Whatever happens from here, this one is a win in my book. It gave the timeline buttons to click and things to post about for over a week which is all we can really ask for at this stage of the game. Hats off to XRPant and Chris for knocking it out of the park here.

There are some fun miner (😏) storylines around this one that you guys should be aware of.

First of all, I’d like to call attention to the fact that these are NOT real miners! We’re mining a fake hCash coin with fake miners here!

Don’t overthink it! We put the pictures in the squares to make more coins so we can put more pictures in squares!

Personally I’ve never found the whole “miner” flavor very appealing (maybe because I’m not a NERRRD) but it’s fun to see this trip people up.

Also it looks like the first copycat (avaxgpu) that I mentioned last week has shut down, and a new fork has been spun up by the same people as “avaxwindcash.” I won’t link the Twitter here, just don’t be a fool!

I wouldn’t usually leak DMs but I will leave you with this. Enjoy:

Tokens Are Not Needed

I’ve had multiple people send me this conversation this week, and it’s a slow week so let’s dive in.

I have bad news for all drama enjoyoors, but I actually agree with everyone in this screenshot!

Voh is correct that most things don’t need a speculative asset, Kevin is correct that most people learn this the hard way by holding that asset to zero, and Whisky is correct that AVAX holders are learning this right now!

If I may doompost for a bit, it’s important to remember that all these crypto tokens are BS—they’re a way for companies to print money out of thin air. AvaLabs has the opportunity to send red fairy dust (that they invented) to an exchange and cash out money to an actual, real life bank account to pay expenses. This is not possible without a token! The reason the token exists is to be sold.

The silver lining here is that while you could obviously lament that the AVAX token is not needed, you can make the same argument for pretty much any token in existence! None of these coins are necessary from a utility perspective, they exist almost solely for funding purposes. We are merely gamblers speculating on them.

AVAX Team1 in the Trenches

To end on a positive note, I wanted to highlight the work that Team1 has done this week mixing it up with the community.

As you can see above, they quickly published an article on a relevant ponzi happening on chain—this is cool! It shows awareness of what’s taking place in our world and it’s always nice to see that from official channels.

Also this week they announced that Andy’s project, We Keep Winning, was receiving a mini grant of $5000.

I’ve written many times in this space about how it wouldn’t take much to start some kind of mini grant program rewarding native builders, and it’s great to see this start coming to fruition. The amount of change that can be made with a small amount of money (for them) is really underestimated, and I look forward to seeing more announcements like this in the future!

That’s all for this week! We have some developing stories as well (some drama about Arena team not paying employees or loans, Build Games entry closes with 2000 applicants) so we will watch those moving forward.

I did end up applying for Build Games at the last minute, so I can bring you live reporting from the inside! Hopefully should be some good fodder for next week, but it never hurts to crash out anyway. As always, please feel free to cause drama and tag me in the comments.

Tweet Defi Primitive of the Week

(don’t get used to this)

Another week, another Avalore dump. Honestly felt like the timeline was a bit dead this week—people are too tired to even crashout anymore! Very sad. Please consider voicing your angry opinions over and over again. And for the love of god please do it EARLY in the week. Monday is a great day to crashout! Friday is not!

Thank you for your consideration. Let’s do the news.

Signs of Life on Chain?

I won’t get too excited just yet but it seems like after a long drought, people are starting to do things on chain again. We have multiple ponzis coming down the pipe, starting with Club Hash Cash by AVAX natives and top lads XRPant and Chris Fusillo.

This should be a good test of what the communities current appetite for clicking buttons is. I haven’t been following it as closely as I would have liked, as unfortunately our house lost both water and heat this week. However, it seems like people are at least having some kind of fun again, which is all a kid like me could really ask for.

In fact, we’re already getting copycats! Amazing! Maybe the ecosystem is really beginning to ramp up!

We also have the $EARLY ponzi coming from everyone’s favorite emo 17-year-old, Snaps. It seems like a novel concept, something about weighted reflections for early holders? I don’t know, I haven’t read the docs—I just clicked the buttons. Bring back degen season!

I won’t speak on the potential success of these projects. Last time I praised someone just for building, I got in trouble as people bought CAPY despite me saying that the token was probably dead on arrival (it was). BUT, I will be watching these with great interest to see if we can support experiments on chain again.

Nobs had a good tweet about it this week, but basically there’s very little incentive to build if there are no users. This is probably true for every chain except Solana now. If we can prove that building is profitable here, we will start to see more building. Shocking!

As an aside, this is probably why people wanted more financial support for Bears and Salmon. If a token that had the entire community excited could only top around $2M, why would anyone launch something here? It’s a proof of concept issue.

New FDN Hires

We had two new Foundation hires announced this week—Matias and Eric! Welcome to the spotlight guys! I’m sure you won’t face any criticism and will have a lovely, relaxing time on Twitter!

In all seriousness, it’s great that the first things they posted were about interacting with the community. I feel like I’m getting incredibly repetitive in these articles, so I really don’t want to keep going into what I think should change around here.

The good news is that I’m unemployed! I can “hop on a call” to discuss this at any time!

I will gently request that we ignore anything Jony talked about though!

The main thing he mentioned was tossing money at DEXes and lending protocols. This incentivizes mercenary capital that will come to LP/lend and then leave when the program is up. It also costs a TON of money. There’s so much money involved in these defi protocols that in order to actually move the APR needle you need to shell out very sizable amounts of AVAX. Overall I think this is not worth it!

It’s easy to shoot down ideas though and harder to propose your own. So I will indeed propose my own! Free of charge!

(TED talk incoming)

Avalanche Community Ecosystem Fund

I would establish the Avalanche Community Ecosystem Fund, which is geared towards actual community members and projects.

I would announce the first initiative, Retro Builder Games (title TBD). I would pledge $250k quarterly towards grants for people who built things that the community actually enjoyed that quarter. These are all retroactive—after you’ve already built a project or initiative, and it is completely live with users and traction, you can apply for what amounts to a reward.

We’ll have a panel of judges from the community (not CEOs of gaming and tradFi companies, but actual community members) who will vote on the winners for each quarter. The winners must have already built something that had a noticeable impact on the community. Ponzis, memecoins, Twitter-focused campaigns, newsletters (😏), anything that people enjoy.

This would create a culture of building on AVAX, and being rewarded for doing so successfully. I think this could have a much greater impact than front-loaded grants to mercenary builders, and would encourage people to just experiment.

For example, right now I’m working on a bunch of different projects but don’t really see a reason to apply to Build Games. They’re all small things that I think the community will like, but there’s no reason for me to jump through hoops in some “incubator” program for a chance at $5k. I’d rather just build, and I think many other people feel the same way. Rewarding people like that would create an incredible experimentation flywheel.

That’s my idea! End of TED talk.

Bad Community! Bad!

Ok now it’s time to channel my inner Voh and police what people are posting on the timeline! I saw a few things that made me sad this week so I want to call attention to them and scold the offenders!

First off, I want to scold Justin for attacking the AVAX tweet with the one-second Superbowl ad. It was well executed and part of the “funny” factor people have been asking for from the main account for years. Encourage this! Don’t shit on it!

To be fair, I think people are complaining because it was almost TOO realistic—they’re not complaining about the AVAX account being funny. I repeat for Avery, PEOPLE ARE NOT COMPLAINING ABOUT JOKES FROM THE AVAX ACCOUNT. THEY DIDN’T KNOW IT WAS A JOKE.

The account has been noticeably better lately and we must encourage this! Please, I beg you!

Then there was this by Whisky. Listen, I’ve already outlined why I don’t have much confidence in Build Games or Retro9000 to actually bring change to our on-chain experience. And of course I agree that people just building things (like Xrpant, Chris, and Wrath) will have a much larger impact, that’s why I proposed the Community Fund idea above.

HOWEVER, as I’m writing this, the signups for Build Games are literally still open! I’ll happily endorse a tweet like this in 3 months when all we have is a bunch of “sustainable businesses” and shitty L1s to show for these initiatives, but for now let’s give it a damn chance at least!

The programs are happening whether we like it or not. If we want our complaints to be taken seriously, we need to be reasonable.

OK!!!! That’s the end of my ranting this week. Can you mfers PLEASE save the drama for earlier in the week?? I just had to rewrite this shit in 30 minutes because you nerds decided to talk smack on the timeline on Friday at noon. Be better next week! See you then.

Tweet(s) of the Week

Well we’ve officially hit 6 months of Avalore! Never thought it would last this long. Unfortunately, the market has decided to punish my persistence by shooting itself into the sun.

If you’re still here, please remember that crypto is a scam and you should take profits early and often. Except $MyBags—that coin is not a scam and has real sustainable revenue. It will change the world!

Anyway, let’s do some news!

$CAPY Does the Thing

Another presale in the books! This one went about as well as could be expected (not well!). I apologize to anyone who took my praise of their app as endorsement of the token.

Friendly reminder that the tech doesn’t matter! Only marketing/hype/founder matters, and this token simply did not have much interest outside the Turkish and French communities.

The presale valuation was way too high (around $900k when I was asked to submit), and only about 1/3rd of the raise went into LP. Also they launched on a day when the market nuked, although to be fair that is every day now. Overall it was a complete recipe for disaster.

I used to laugh when I saw people work on projects as a “Tokenomics Advisor” or something dumb like that, but now after helping various people with tokenomics and seeing launches with math that’s destined to fail, I understand why these roles exist! People are VERY bad at this!

Also it seems like every account in the presale is some kind of low effort alt or bot. I have some of the wallets tagged from various projects I worked on in the past. Who are these people??? Seems like Capy had a number they wanted to raise, and did whatever they could to hit that number.

Overall it’s unfortunate because the devs (not “devs,” but the actual coders) put more effort than many others into delivering a product. It’s just not a product that moves the needle for most people, and it will probably all be forgotten anyway due to poor planning from leadership. I’ll let Digger play us out.

Price is Down, Community is Sad (Again)

I’m really sick and tired of writing the same shit every week! Running out of angles to attack this from, so I’m just gonna use this section to address the main responses that are made to community complaints, and why people tend to find them unsatisfactory.

1. PrIcE iS dOwN eVeRyWhErE

This one grinds my gears the most because it’s such an insane cop-out and feels very condescending. You think we don’t know the whole market is shit?? That’s not the point!

The point, obviously, is that AVAX has gone down much more than other tokens. I know math is tricky and all the numbers are red, so let’s use an example.

If AVAX was down from ATH only as much as Solana, we would be at $44 right now. Forty four!! That’s a 5x from here!

It’s hard for new employees to resonate with this as a lot of them got hired when AVAX was in the $20-$40 range (and probably don’t hold the token anyway), but the reality is that the only people psychotic enough to still be here were around when AVAX was well over $100.

People aren’t frustrated because price is down, we can handle that. People are frustrated because it’s down way more than its peers. The market does not excuse this.

2. StOp AsKiNg AbOuT MeMeCoIns

We get it, FDN will not be buying memecoins. That’s ok! Mfers will act like the only thing that could possibly please the community is pumping our shitters.

While that is obviously one route, it is not the only one! People just want some semblance of interest in on-chain activity. Any form of actual interaction from the company with the people who use this chain daily beyond just group chats and “we’re working on it.”

Right now it feels like there are two completely separate worlds. There’s the AVAX that BDs and executives are working on, and then there’s the AVAX that CT and users interact with.

I don’t mean to shit on Brian here, because obviously this stuff is cool and it’s a job well done. This merely goes to show the disconnect between the worlds. When the suits think of the AVAX “ecosystem” these are the kinds of projects they’re talking about.

I would wager that if you’re reading this you probably haven’t heard of and won’t interact with most of these projects. When I think of “ecosystem” I’m thinking about memes, ponzis, NFTs, and grassroots projects like Pointsmarket.

Yes it’s great that AVAX is doing a nice job on the B2B and tech fronts—every employee made sure to take their victory lap after Vitalik’s L2 comments—but none of this moves the needle for the average chain user.

The community is upset because our section of the ecosystem feels looked down upon. It’s a zoo for the employees to observe from afar and occasionally wade into. Is it necessary at all? Why does the community exist? If AVAX is to continue down the path of what amounts to a B2B company, how do we fit in? I am not a business!

Yes it’s possible tokenomics changes will align these two worlds, but we’re skeptical. We’ve already made massive changes to tokenomics. There was no alignment when L1s were expensive to run, and it appears there’s no alignment when they’re cheap.

Positivity Arc!

Ok that last section was too negative probably. Let’s end the article on a positive note!

AvaLabs is clearly doing a good job onboarding business partners. The tech is something that seems to have a growing market, and there are people who want it. They are “skating to where the puck is going” in the tech/partnerships worlds.

The issues and frustrations coming from the community all stem from the fact that these successes exist completely separate from the version of AVAX that we interact with. Complaints have nothing to do with lack of belief in the Avalanche team’s ability to work towards their north star, and everything to do with the fact that we don’t see where we fit in on that journey.

Are we spinning towards a world where AvaLabs has all kinds of successful partnerships and revenue streams, yet the token is $2 and there is no nobody left on chain?

There are so many incredible builders already on this chain, and the community is undeniably one of the most hilarious and sharp communities in all of crypto. This is why most of us are still here—it’s not the tech, it’s the people.

If the community is really nurtured and supported, the organic excitement would onboard more than any top-down initiative ever could.

That’s all for this week! Sorry if it was too heavy on ramble and not enough drama. Not much going on while the market speedruns to zero!

Thanks for reading half a year worth of these stupid articles. It really has been fun writing them—the lore on this chain is simply unmatched. I love the people who make up this community (that’s you!) and I think we all just want the chain to succeed.

I don’t want to have to bridge somewhere else to make money, I want to do it here with you idiots.

Tweet(s) of the Week

Good morning pookies, welcome to another week of Avalore! I’m not gonna lie to you, we really blew our full load last week. Not as much news (drama) this week but that’s how it goes sometimes! We do the news anyway.

Bear’s Den is Complete!

This week left us with the finale of the Bear’s Den series from the Bears and Salmon team. I have some bias as one of the judges for week 2, but I just want to congratulate the team on a job well done.

The process has been incredibly transparent, and it seems like now we’ve got three new projects funded and hitting the blockchain!

These are not just random French teams tokenizing the restaking of pencil sharpeners, either. These are honest to goodness real things for the Avalanche community to do!

And all three are games! So they’re all eligible for the AVAX Build Games grants as well.

Oh, those aren’t just for games? Are you sure??

Capysword Game Launch

Honestly, I was not expecting much from this project. French devs (second French mention this article, vive), presale at 1M valuation, glorified coinflip, etc etc.

HOWEVER, it seems like their execution has been pretty solid. I have not yet had the chance to “enter the arena” as they say, but early feedback has been positive.

I’ve said it before many times in this article, but I will always support devs that are working hard to give the people something fun to do on chain, and this fits squarely in that category. Nice work, Capy team!

The coin has not yet launched though. It’s all fun and games until there’s a token involved!

A Turkish/French user base combined with Arena users. What could go wrong?? I’m sure the token launch will be…..interesting.

[Obligatory News Section to Appease Management]

Some good news for the followers of Avalanche on LinkedIn this week—the first ETF for AVAX has went live! I’m told this means that boomers will be flocking in droves to pour their remaining savings into an extremely risk-on asset in an extremely risk-on asset class!

Jokes aside, this can only be a good thing. It gives AVAX some form of legitimacy in the mainstream, putting it alongside titans like BTC, ETH, SOL, and XRP (and DOGE, apparently? Am I reading that right?). Nice work from the team on this one, and hopefully this added legitimacy will trickle down to users in the form of increased price! That’s all we care about, after all.

In other great news for the suit-wearing AVAX connoisseurs, we have passed 1 billion transactions on C-Chain!

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention everyone’s favorite “old man yelling at cloud” community member Zedi here. Let’s see what he has to say on the matter.

We’ve discussed this many, many times in this space so I don’t have much to add. These numbers clearly do not represent actual on-chain usage and are simply pumping metrics for metrics sake. I don’t know why they always post about it.

You know what, never mind! These transactions are probably legit. Keep posting about them!

I’m willing to admit defeat here. We post metrics so that people like Messari and Grayscale and Grok will post the metrics. Love this for us! Hopefully this will lead to increased 🔺doption and price going up.

That’s all the news for this week! We take what we can get, but please if you guys could crashout more for next week’s 6 month anniversary article, that would be great. We had some decent tweets this week though so I will treat you to a few that didn’t make it into the article! See you next week.

Tweet(s) of the Week

Wow! Some weeks it feels like I’m squeezing the life out of two tweets trying desperately to hit some kind of made up minimum article length I have in my head.

This is not one of those weeks!! What a flurry of activity on the timeline. My newsletter weekly notes section is completely packed to the brim. I don’t even know where to start or how to structure this one as there’s so much to talk about. I counted and I have 30 tweets saved for this week.

I don’t know how this is gonna work, but let’s do the news. Buckle up.

Who Should Get a Grant?

You may not remember this as it was about 15 community crashouts ago, but the week’s drama started when Andy posted that he had been denied a grant for his current project, We Keep Winning.

This of course brought grants to the forefront of everyone’s mind. If Andy wasn’t able to get one, who was?

Tac pulled up the list of projects who most recently received grants through the Retro9000 initiative, and needless to say he was unimpressed. There was some back and forth here where Kriddo defended all the French projects (shocking) but after Tac did some research on these, they seem to be mostly tech slop with barely working projects (also shocking).

Long tweet incoming, you can skip it and just read his final paragraph to get the idea.

Now I’m not trying to say Andy deserves a grant over these projects just because he’s an AVAX member. Obviously certain things fit the program and certain things don’t.

Also I’m not trying to say that it’s bad if projects who receive grants end up failing. This is natural as not everything will succeed. In this case though, the grant was intended to be retroactive—it was supposed to be a reward for already achieving some level of success.

What I AM trying to say, and this is important context for later, is that historically these grant programs have not produced value for users of this chain.

If you scroll up and look at the projects that got funding, did any of them have any impact on you? Maybe you got rugged on Memoria or Koroshi or something, but other than that, anything positive? If you’re an FChain power user let me know in the comments!

They’re Not Buying our Memes, Bro

We finally got a definitive answer on FDN’s stance on memecoins! It’s probably not the one most people wanted, but at least we can move on now.

I won’t talk about this specifically too much, but I will say this. People in crypto really want two things:

1. Make money

2. Have fun

Memecoins provide those two things in abundance, which is why the memecoin program is what many consider one of the “golden ages” of AVAX. Lots of money was made, lots of fun was had. To this date, I believe memecoins are one of the only things that has actually found product-market fit in crypto.

HOWEVER, and this is important, memecoins are not the ONLY thing that will satisfy the community. Avalabs members act like the community is mad because they’re not buying memecoins (true) and that nothing else they do will be able to satisfy the masses (false!!). This is another common theme and will come up again later!

Yes, the community is mad because almost everyone views the memecoin program as a success and Avalabs has now outright stated it won’t be coming back. But that is not the main frustration!

One of the reasons this is so frustrating is because the other initiatives (see the “Who Should Get a Grant” section above) do not feel community aligned and have led to very little impact on the average user.

That ticks the “direction” box that Excel mentioned above. Now let’s talk about “transparency!”

30M To Coinbase

Wow! I’m inserting myself into the story! Just disgusting.

I won’t say much here as this horse has been beaten to death. Those of you familiar with Hanlon’s Razor may be wondering if Kevin is trying to insinuate that the FDN is acting out of stupidity, not out of malice. Is that better?

Anyway, the FDN doesn’t have a responsibility to explain to us what is happening, but they should also not be surprised that people have latched on to the “30M to Coinbase” meme so tightly. If you want to be silent on it that’s fine, but these are the consequences.

I think any amount of transparency would go a long way here, so we’ll see what they decide to cook up. For the record I think it’s unlikely that these are literally all full stack sells. But what do I know?

Build Games (or Anything, Doesn’t Have to Be Games)

We finally got clarity on what the hyped 1/20 announcement was! AVAX announced “Build Games,” a grant program where the winning projects will receive a share of a $1M prizepool.

General reaction to this seems to be pretty decent, but reaction from the core AVAX community was, well, it was bad. Reaction was so negative that tensions between the community and the AvaLabs employees working on the program were really starting to escalate. I even wrote an emergency mid-week article! Please read that as I don’t want to be repetitive here and go over the same points.

I also won’t talk about how obviously people would think that a program called “Build Games” is asking them to build games. That would be a layup! I won’t mention how they could have just called it “The Build Games” or “Builder Games” to get around this. Many people have pointed it out so I don’t want to pile on here!

The summary of this whole Build Games situation is that people feel misled because this massive announcement was hyped up, and it turned out to be a type of program that (see: the grants section above) hasn’t had a big impact on the actual community. That doesn’t mean this particular program won’t have an impact, but we have lots of data on these things and they have yet to trickle down into value for the users of our beloved chain.

Personally I’m not a big fan of these types of initiatives as I think they tend to reward founder slop and not necessarily projects that benefit the chain. I think people with good ideas will just build them and they will gain traction. Good founders won’t wait around for a program incentivizing them to build. The types of people this tends to attract are people looking to cash in and leave.

THAT BEING SAID, I am willing to reserve judgement until we see what comes from this. It seems like people from AvaLabs are starting to listen, and they will reward projects that will have tangible effects on the users. I believe!

Another major pressure point is the fact that this announcement comes at a time where basically the only thing going on in the community is Bears Den—a similar community run program where projects are competing for grants.

Again, this is a problem that I believe can be solved fairly easily. The prevailing sentiment from Ava Labs employees is that the community will fud everything they do no matter what. I don’t think that’s true—the community just doesn’t feel seen or heard at all.

For example, if Ava Labs announced tomorrow that Bears and Salmon will be the first confirmed recipient of a Build Games grant, and that they’ll get $10k (or whatever) to give to the winner of their competition, this would be HUGE for showing the community that you care about them, and would instantly win a lot of people over.

On another note, I don’t want to end this section without mentioning the MUCH bigger (40m vs 1m) fund that was announced the day after Build Games. This initiative is cool because in theory, apps that gain actual traction will be rewarded. In practice, we have not seen many good things come from the Retro9000 program and these numbers will be very easy to game. Again, I will choose to remain optimistic for now.

My Call to Action

I want to end this article with a call to action for both Ava Labs and you—my beloved, down-bad AVAX community members.

To Ava Labs,

I promise the community loves this chain and wants to support you. People are fed up because almost all messaging/initiatives seem to be written from an ivory tower without much care for anything happening in the community. There are in fact announcements that will make people happy. They exist! And not just about buying memecoins!

I understand that there are new employees who don’t know all the lore, but the reality is that the community cannot be expected to take everything on good faith, especially in crypto. As Excel said, “Give the lads something to be bullish on.” It feels like we haven’t gotten that in a long time. If you guys take care to shape the narrative towards how things will tangibly benefit the community, people WILL react positively. Just make people feel heard and you will get lots of support.

To the community,

We can’t do what they think we’ll do and fud every announcement for no reason. I encourage you all to try to be level-headed. Ava Labs is doing what they think is best for the chain, whether you agree with them or not. Please try to keep disagreements civil. Show them that we can be reasonable, that there are things we really will support.

And please, please, PLEASE, if some announcement comes out that actually seems bullish for us, we MUST shout it from the rooftops and amplify it. Show leadership that if we actually are thrown a bone, we’ll run with it.

If cool projects start coming out of these builder initiatives, let’s make sure to give credit where it’s due and rally behind our chain.

Wow what an eventful week! Long article!

It feels like things are really starting to come to a head on our chain. I think we’re at a pretty major crossroads where the community will either start to completely abandon the chain OR will be forged into diamonds through bullish community/Ava Labs feedback loops. Either way it’s an exciting time to be here!

Tweet(s) of the Week

Long week, so more tweets!

what can i say

banger

Coming up on half a year of these! Really incredible. I bet you nerds didn’t think this would last so long! We’re still here, still doing the news and Frogwell is still giving me covers every week out of the goodness of his heart. Bless him.

Bit of a light drama week, but let’s do the news!

The Grotto Stealth Launches

I know it’s hard to believe, but our lovable little scamp Wrathtank has been working on an L1 for months! I’m surprised he’s never mentioned it, but I guess he wanted to go for the shock factor of a launch that nobody saw coming.

I’ll be honest I don’t really know what happens on The Grotto but we like Wrath so we will click the buttons and do the things. I guess we need to release games? Or play games? And post on a social feed? Idk, but we will support him! Go Wrath go!

On a serious note, Wrath squeezed a ton of features out of Snaps for this one. It’s a fully functional itch.io style game library/uploader, along with a social feed, along with a token launcher, along with an assets marketplace. Huge props to the Grotto team for getting this all together—it’s nice to see the Wrathtank fever dream come to reality.

Bears Den Week 1

Bears and Salmon had their first “Bear’s Den” space where 4 contestants (including the aforementioned Wrathtank) pitched their ideas for funding from the Bands team.

The pitches were a bit long, but honestly much more coherent than I was expecting. Wrath pitched some kind of indie game (duh) and then said that he’s gonna build it regardless of whether or not he gets funding—very poor negotiation by him.

Pyth from Nochill pitched “Nochill Racing” which is a public game similar to duck racing/marble racing to determine who wins a giveaway. It’s apparently fully functional already which is pretty sweet. We stan our developer kings!

I’m not sure why he called it “Nochill Racing” instead of “Nochillio Racing” though. The Nochillio NFTs came before the token and are more important, so maybe he just made a mistake here?

Pleb then went on to pitch a ponzi eerily similar to Crabada that also appears to be fully functional! Just need to reskin the “Blorps” to “Salmon” and we’re good to go here.

I’m a big fan of anyone building anything, so props to all these teams for actually going out there and doing shit. Inspirational!

Luigi Steps Down

Chief Strategy Officer Luigi DeMeo announced he’s stepping down from the position this week to relax and spend some time with his family.

If you’ve spent any time on this chain at all, you know what a big impact Luigi has had here. You’ve probably cursed his name a few times, critiqued his decisions, maybe even tossed around some light insider trading allegations.

Him stepping down has me feeling like the fans in Kobe’s retirement commercial (go watch if you haven’t). Who do we hate now? Who do we blame?

Thankfully, Luigi will still be around for a bit as he winds down his role in The Avalanche Foundation (FDN is a completely different entity then AvaLabs, stop getting them confused they have nothing to do with each other).

While we wait for a new ex-Solana employee to take his place, we shall search for a fresh scapegoat to blame all our problems on. Personally, I’d like to nominate Nicolas Lemaitre. He’s on the FDN board, he’s French, he’s really a perfect candidate.

On a happier note, I want to thank Luigi for everything he’s done. I’ve been critical of him in this space in the past, but the reality is that AVAX has been the easiest chain to make money on over the past year, and Luigi was a huge reason why. We’ve seen lots of crime under his reign, and the AVAX community has really prospered from it.

I think any of us would look at what’s happening now on chain and BEG for the days of complaining about Foundation buying Jesus Martinez coins and insider trading. Thank you for pumping our coins, Luigi, and let me know when the seed round starts for your next adventure. DMs always open!

That’s all for this week! Not as much juice as last week. We need more deleted tweets and employee crash outs please! See you next week.

Tweet of the Week

Congratulations on finding this post! It must have been hard to get here amongst all the Twitter articles on vibe coding Polymarket arbitrage bots. This article will NOT be about that, unfortunately. Please look elsewhere for generational wealth opportunities.

It seems like we actually have some things to talk about this week! It’s been a bit dry through the holidays, so it’s nice to have some Juicy™ drama to talk about. Let’s dive in!

War on Baghdaddi

Moonbags returns to Twitter with a manifesto (it’s long, I cut it down for you above) after a small hiatus.

The main points are that he’s a good guy at heart because he didn’t dump his own Juicy allocation on everyone’s head, has been grinding hard, and he is really upset at people for not understanding how startups work.

Of course Tactical Retreat has a lot of Moonbags’ wallets tagged and took this opportunity to point out that he had in fact been selling his Juicy!

Moonbags then fired back, saying that only a “moron” would make this accusation, and that the wallets people are sharing as his are misattributed. The people sharing them know nothing!

If you’re going to call Tac stupid, you had better be correct. He’s retired now and has all kinds of free time! I won’t rehash the whole article, but if you haven’t read it you should read it here.

The TLDR is Moonbags sold on tons of wallets that are easily traceable to him (things like payments from past jobs, transfers from his Friendtech wallet, etc) and he also defaulted on loans (see: sold) for about 16.5% of supply! On top of this, he was offering OTC deals at discounts in the 20-60% range that were dumped immediately (also selling). Uh oh!

People will poke a lot of fun at Moonbags for launching and moving on from so many projects—we do so ourselves in the great cover art by Frogwell this week. I don’t really think that’s the issue here, as plenty of people have made good money off his work and he does put lots of time and effort into each one.

I also don’t even really think there’s an issue with him selling. He’s free to sell his token if he wants. If he needs to sell to keep the project alive that’s just the way it goes sometimes.

It’s really just a character issue that has people so worked up. He plays the role of “experimenter” which I will always support, but when he is working on something he will constantly be yapping about how it’s going to be amazing and his holders will be so rich if they just believe in him.

This is the part that people are really mad about. It has nothing to do with his actions, and everything to do with his words and the way he carries himself. As Nobs says above, people will be very quick to jump on mistakes if you’re cocky and are not properly managing expectations.

It’s these kind of holier than thou interactions that put people off and make them more likely to read his actions as malicious.

In his mind, what he’s building is cool and new and real. These other people are building simple things for simple people—Moonbags is Steve Jobs in a world full of founders with no vision.

I don’t think he means to come across this way (who would?) but he does, and that’s the real reason why people “witch hunt” him.

Another “prev: Solana” Has Hit the Timeline

We have a new ex-Solana employee in town! Kevin Ricoy was brought on to Ava Labs as the new Director of External Media. I didn’t know what that means so I assume you don’t either: he leads Ava Labs public image by managing media relations, public relations and social media.

Tough start to his campaign as it began with him typing up some incredibly long-winded soup and then immediately deleting it. Oops! I’ll highlight some parts I found noteworthy, but if you want you can read the whole thing here.

Firstly, this whole post was in response to Zedi (friend of the newsletter, yeller at clouds) calling out the rampant fake transactions we’ve been seeing over the last few months. This is something we’ve talked about many times in this article, so I will try to be quick.

Zedi has found that approximately half the transactions on Avax are coming from two botnets just transferring money back and forth to each other. He has never attributed this to Ava Labs specifically, but with them constantly bullposting stuff like transaction numbers it seems plausible it’s them.

He did some follow up research that I will link for the nerds here but the short of it is that our chain has A LOT of fake activity, even when compared to the obvious wash trading that goes on elsewhere.

I wanted to highlight this because it was part of a larger point that the Solana community is what jump-started adoption and price recovery, not foundation or labs. I guess this could be partly true, but do we really think Solana meme season was fully organic? Is he going to argue that Foundation/Labs wasn’t spending tons of resources to make memes take off on Solana?

I suppose it’s possible—I don’t really have any inside info here. I just believe it’s highly unlikely that something like that $BOME (Book of Memes) thing could reach $1B market cap in a single day, getting listings on major exchanges within 6 hours (!) of launch without help from Solana Foundation/Labs.

My guess is they were doing the same types of things we were doing during our meme seasons, just in a less detectable way and at a larger scale. Or maybe they benefitted from the fact that nobody can read Solana block explorers. Who can say!

So this brings me to the final point, and one that hits on something I try to harp on in this space. I agree it’s not Labs/Foundations job to completely manufacture interest/demand here. However, I would say it is their job to amplify the things that people are excited about. They should be fanning the flames of what’s good in the ecosystem in order to draw more people here.

Everyone is excited about a new token? Ok, let’s set up a plan to buy it so people will be making money and posting about it all over the timeline. That’s how you get new people here, not by constantly tweeting about how active the chain is because it passed some new contract deployment count milestone.

The idea that “trying to grow consumptive demand and support the ecosystem” is “never promised and far from guaranteed” is incredibly disheartening. If they’re not going to be doing that, why are we here? People are on AVAX because they believe in the chain and the people running it, but as that belief falters, it will be tough to stay. Why would I want to use a chain where something as basic as “supporting the ecosystem” is not guaranteed?

To close this section on a lighter note, I thought this post from Kno was hilarious and Kevin’s spotlight of it shows that he probably is a good dude and is willing to mix it up with the community. That’s all we can really ask for, so I look forward to seeing how this plays out in the future. He did delete the tweet after all, so maybe it’s not fully representative of his views.

That’s all the news I’ve got for this week! Feels great to have things to write about again. Keep up the good work folks! I expect a few more deleted tweets and witch hunts next week. Please schedule them for Monday-Tuesday so I can compile all the relevant data.

I will say I'm slightly considering turning these into X articles for more reach, but I also do this for fun and like this format. Let me know if you think I should change it in the comments!

Tweet of the Week

Happy new year! The holidays are (mostly) behind us, so we can finally get back to our regular scheduled programming soon.

Things have been a bit slow recently, I assume because people are doing boring shit like spending time with their families. It’s time to stop touching grass! We can make drama again guys!

There’s not a ton of news, so let’s go over some and then I’ll give my AVAX New Year’s Resolutions.

Tac “Fuds” Arena

We talked about this a bunch in Week 19 so I won’t rehash too much of it here, but this narrative from Arena supporters that Bears and Salmon “killed Arena” is just hilarious to me.

I did some Dune research and found that the $BANDS token added roughly $30k in sell volume to the Arena token. This was not including any buys the team made for LP, or any people buying to become Arena Champion.

There was $1.5M of liquidity for $ARENA at launch—it has since been decreased substantially. If you think this amount of sell pressure caused a 40% (!) drop in token price, I don’t know what to tell you.

Also, just so we’re clear, pairing with $ARENA was Arena team’s idea. Flywheel! Stop bringing this up! This is the last I will talk about this matter, I swear it.

Tac has had lots of free time on his hands the last few days (maybe his kid is distracted by sirens?) and has decided to swing back at the “Arena Champions” and give me something to write about this week. Thanks, Tac!

His most exciting find was that one of the lead Arena devs, Dural, has wallets that appear to be linked to the same Binance deposit addresses as the old Party Mansion team! How exciting!

Is Dural really Kontrol? Partychad? Who can say! Using the same Binance deposit address is pretty damning. Congrats on them for securing another million dollar payday though! Partychad is certainly never beating the “Emin’s cousin” allegations. I’ll let you check Tac’s work and decide for yourself what to believe.

AVAX New Year’s Resolutions

Without much else to talk about this year, let’s kill time with some wishes!

Here are the New Year’s Resolutions I would make if I was president of AVAX:

1. De-Boomer the AVAX Twitter Account

They’ve been better about this lately, but my first resolution is to continue that trend and stop posting LinkedIn slop on the Twitter account. The audience is CT, you don’t need to post these nonsense numbers. Everyone knows they’re BS and is laughing at them. Post them where the institutions are looking! They don’t know! They like numbers!

Same goes for the “how do you do fellow kids” type humor. This will play very well on LinkedIn!

My first resolution is that the AVAX CT account will focus almost entirely on AVAX CT (retweets of builders, memes, art). Maybe we can give Disco, Smoothies, and Wrath access so they can plug in with the degens?

Again, I want to re-iterate that the account is much better about this now, but I want to see it continue this into 2026.

2. Community Micro Grants

This one is simple. In 2026, we shall begin a community micro grant program. There are so many people doing cool stuff on the chain, and they really don’t need much money to do it.

My hope for next year is that we have some kind of defined flow for applying for small grants. For example, how cool would it be if I could pay Frogwell $500/month to do these Avalore covers? Or $400 and keep $100 for myself!

We could even do things like pay artists $100/week to do art for the AVAX main account posts (see resolution #1). These types of small grants for established community members could go a long way towards strengthening the community and keeping sentiment high.

With the amount of money spent on one day of $LAMBO buys, we could probably pay everyone in the ecosystem $500/month for a year! Food for thought.

3. Stop Onboarding Random People to Build Shit and Leave

In 2026 my final resolution is to stop onboarding random washed people and hyping up their projects. This is something we’ve been doing for a few years now, but in 2026 it will stop!

We don’t need another forked DEX from an “influencer” next year! We don’t need an anime PFP project from a Solana pump and dumper! We don’t even need a new NFT marketplace from people who don’t know how EVM chains work!

In 2026 if we want something we will ask our community to build it and hype them up when they do.

4. Discontinue Certain Regional AVAX Accounts

No comment here!

And that’s all I’ve got for this week! Sorry I have not been working at 100% strength these last few weeks—it’s been a busy time. Marriage, Christmas, New Years, bang bang bang. Hopefully as we move into the new year drama will pick up and I can spend more time writing about it.

Here’s to a prosperous 2026 in the world of Avalanche decentralized blockchain cryptocurrency!

Tweet of the Week

I’m literally writing this on Christmas day! I’ve snuck off to the toilet to do some writing while Kieks and my parents yap about who knows what. Just to paint a picture of how things are going here, I put on one of those “Endless Lofi Christmas Music” videos for background noise and the parents got outraged 15 minutes in that the video was just a loop.

“What’s the point of this, it’s barely more than a screensaver!”

Yes that’s literally the point! Nailed it!

Anyway, it seems like things are relatively quiet on the AVAX front these days. I thought about skipping this week but I know that everyone will give me shit for it, so instead let’s try and speedrun the news.

Bears and Salmon Holds Strong

I’ve actually been pretty impressed with the strength of Bears and Salmon as we move two weeks from launch. Presalers are still up around 5x so there’s not much to complain about. That won’t stop people from complaining though—I’m sure many are still dancing on its grave, laughing about how right they were.

I won’t talk about them here! It’s the holidays, let’s be positive!

Anyway, the team has announced their “Bears Den” will be starting next week. Contestants will pitch games that make use of the $BANDS token in exchange for funding. They have some pretty high profile judges, so at the very least it should be entertaining. Hopefully we get some new ponzis out of this.

Presale Token NFT SZN

Merry Ketmas! The KET team decided to stealth launch PFPs for orb holders today. I love it when projects do shit like this. Clearly they’re not making money on this and it’s just to give supporters a little gift.

A lot of the appeal of KET from the beginning has been the team and their willingness to experiment, so yeah this is right up my alley. Props to them for coming through on something that they really didn’t need to do at all. Warms my heart!

BLUB then went on to announce that Blubzukis are coming the day after! More free (I assume) stuff for Blublievers! Again, I think it’s really cool that these teams are pushing stuff out. They could definitely have abandoned these NFTs and nobody would really notice.

Wink NFTs soon right? Right???

Capy Presale Nears Completion

For all the DWS haters in the chat, this is your moment! Finally a launch with no Deep Waitor Studio involvement!

I’ll be honest I haven’t had a ton of time to follow this one closely, but it seems like they have a game or something and are more developed than just a memecoin. Personally, as you might have gleaned from reading this article, I don’t spend much time on Arena so this launch has mostly gone over my head.

The only thing I really know about it is that the presale market cap is around $900k, which seems a bit high to me! It scared me away at first, but then some people convinced me to split an allocation with them so I’ve got skin in the game now.

This is the big chance for the chain to show how nefarious and bad DWS is, and how great the French are. I look forward to the launch. Bonne chance !

That’s all I’ve got for this week! The final Avalore of 2025! I thought about doing some kind of “2025 Wrapped” article but there’s been no time. Touching grass, or something like that.

Thank you all for staying with me in this journey to chronicle the lore of our beloved red chain. It’s been really fun to write these, and it will be even more fun to write them in 2026 when AVAX is $100 after Nobs finally stops with his sell walls. See you next year!

Tweet(s) of the Week

Couldn’t decide on one so you get two! Bye!

We’re back baby! Honeymoon is over (writing this from the airport on the way home) and it’s back on the grind. Well, now we have Christmas week. And then New Year’s. Damn! Busy schedule! No rest for the lore chronicler though.

Anyway, the main thing soaking up mindshare on AVAX CT this week is, you guessed it, Bears and Salmon. Sorry this space has been very BANDS focused these last few weeks, but it’s the main thing going on! I don’t think I’m biased! Let’s do the thing.

WL is a Scam??

I don’t like talking about this guy because, like his PFP, he really is an NPC. I’m also not entirely sure what he’s insinuating here, but I saw some people agreeing with this take that the short whitelist was somehow nefarious.

As one of the people who pushed for a short whitelist, let me just state that the reason it was short because I figured 3 minutes would be plenty of time for WL people to buy. I thought non-WLers or whales wouldn’t want to buy a token that had spent the last 20 minutes giving Nochillios and Arena Champions (no offense) an earlier entry.

It never even crossed my mind that people would have so little faith in the Arena product (more on this later) that they would assume it wouldn’t even work for the first 3 minutes! There was no psyop here!

I had time to go back and look at the numbers for the WL period, and there were upwards of 400 buys before the token went public. It finished above a 7M mcap, so clearly people were getting buys through.

The idea that “nobody had a chance to buy at WL price” is simply incorrect. Also, since the token ended the WL period at such a high market cap, you were likely better off waiting for it to retrace a few minutes later anyway!

Arena takes a big Load

Ok, now that we’ve shown that people were able to buy during the WL period, we need to address the fact that plenty of people had issues with the frontend. Perhaps, as Pilot Matt suggested above, it was silly for the team to assume that the frontend would be able to handle the load for such an anticipated token.

I’ll be honest, I did not use the site during the WL period as it was late and I was drunk. However, for your reading pleasure I’ve grabbed a few tweets from the timeline from some users about their experience:

So this is likely cherry picking (as I said, 400+ buys went through) but there were definitely some major issues that need to be addressed before the next big launch. Also the tweets are funny so I’m including them. Sorry!

Another thing that needs to be noted is that the default launch mechanics for Arena tokens involve “extending” the whitelist AFTER the token launch. This means that even if you were whitelisted, you might have had issues buying immediately on launch.

In the case of Bears and Salmon, the final WL extension happened 13 seconds after launch, so it’s possible people were spamming buy for 13 seconds and wondering why the TX wasn’t going through.

Overall there were clearly hiccups, but it’s hard for me to tell how widespread they are. Based on anecdotal evidence from people I know, I’d call this launch about 50% successful from a technical standpoint. Not great, but honestly better than I was expecting.

Paying the Team

So as we all know by now, dev Vitagliano full stacked his entire allocation for $12k within the first 5 minutes of the token being live. I do believe devs should get paid, but what he did was undeniably shitty and self-serving.

The team was in a hard position, as Vita worked on the initial application site but then was fired. Giga, out of the goodness of his heart, agreed to let Vita keep the allocation with some assurances that it wouldn’t be use like this. Giga choose salmon, Vita choose bear.

This of course brought team payments to the forefront, with people calling for things like paying the team in USDC or having vesting tokens. Let’s discuss that!

The argument for paying in USDC is basically that it stops this exact scenario. However, those USDC payments need to be made back somehow, likely by the team selling tokens. In general this is bad optics and it’s better to let the team sell their own tokens (see: sending 30m to Coinbase vs Luigi selling some of his own AVAX).

Also just to be clear, the team did pay a ton of people in USDC as well. Giga paid a total of around $20k to team members before launch. With a raise of ~$70k and about half that going to purchasing $ARENA for liquidity, that does not leave much runway for a project outside of selling its own tokens.

Ok so fine we’ll pay in tokens, but at least let’s make them vest! How has nobody thought of this!?

This one is pretty simple—nobody is taking a job for vested tokens. For founders this makes plenty of sense as it’s their project, but you think a website dev is going to attach their pay to the long-term success of someone else’s leadership? In crypto? Locking up the tokens for any amount of time will be a hard no from me, dawg.

So I guess in summary there’s no perfect option. Paying people in allocation is fine, you just need to be careful about how much you give them and figure out if they will be dicks or not.

PrIvAtE pReSaLe???

I’ll be brief with this one because I think it’s dumb. If you spent months and months building up a project, would you not give access to your friends? If you released a coin today, and you have people that you’ve been friends with for years, you’re not giving them anything?

If that’s you, I’m happy you’re not my friend!

The “private presale” was small—it was a paid salmon allocation for some of Giga and Smoothies’ friends. I think that’s pretty reasonable. Maybe he gave access to more people than I would have, but not by much. Every coin has things like this, it’s just something you need to learn to accept. Moving on!

The $Arena Flywheel

One of the main selling points of Arena v2 was that tokens would be paired with $ARENA instead of AVAX. Turns out that’s not always a good thing! Arena supporters (and the arena team) noticed that the price of the token immediately went down after Bears and Salmon launch. Why???

Well, the Arena team has been quick to blame the “presale” aspect of the token.

I can see the argument—people are getting airdropped this new token (without buying $ARENA) and selling it through $ARENA to AVAX causing selling pressure. I could see how that would be bad for the token.

However, it’s important to remember that the $ARENA in the LP had to have been purchased too, right? There’s currently $40k worth of $ARENA in the LP, so those are tokens that are “locked” that otherwise wouldn’t have been.

There has obviously been overall more $BANDS buy volume than sell volume since launch (the token price is above launch price) so I’m not sure how much this argument holds water.

Personally I got Arena Champion for this launch and sold my $ARENA back to AVAX after the whitelist period. I imagine there were other people who did the same which may have caused a dump.

Also the token now has $1.5M worth of liquidity on chain, so I’m not sure this type of stuff could be moving price down 22% on it’s own.

Either way, this shouldn’t be a problem anymore! New presales will be adding AVAX LP! I find this pretty annoying because as someone who was working on the launch strategy for this token, I would have much preferred to launch with an AVAX LP. But alas! We live and we learn!

Bad Week for Baghdaddy

Uh oh! Moonbags got drunk on a space and talked shit about Nobs! Full disclosure: I was not in this space, so this is secondhand. I’m spreading rumors! This is a true smut column now!

I don’t have much to add other than the above summary.

Wait a minute…

It was a paid body double he met! Not the real Nobs! Now I’m wondering if the Nobs I met was a body double as well. She didn’t seem that smart either. Hmmmmmmmm.

Uh oh again! Dokyo team is quitting due to “differences in alignment!”

I think the short summary here is they haven’t heard from Moonbags in two months, so decided it’s time to pull the plug.

I don’t know who else is on the team besides Hazy honestly, but I guess now there is no team!

I find it hilarious that they put up with Brando for so long, but a couple months of Bags and they just can’t take it anymore. Personally I’d prefer Moonbags!

Everyone has their breaking point I guess. And now (hopefully) Dokyo can fade into the ether and I don’t have to hear about it or its IP ever again.

Ok that’s all I’ve got for this week. I’m going to miss my flight if I write any longer. Editor’s note: didn't miss it, sending this from the plane.

Sorry but I didn’t have time to pull many punches (or edit) this week! So it goes, sometimes.

Overall the Bears and Salmon presalers are up more than 5x, the launch on Arena had issues but was not horrible, and Dokyo is gone! It’s not a bad week!

Next article will be written from the good ol’ US of A baby. Freedomland! See you there.

Tweet of the Week