Another week in the books!

Things are a bit slow these days so there’s not a ton to talk about this week. This is kinda true across the board though—pretty much every community is seeing a bit of a lull as we go into the holidays.

The only big thing we’ve seen recently is Papertrade, but alas the team decided to run that one into the ground. Almost makes me want to start writing a Cryptolore article about it!

Almost.

For now let’s spin through some AVAX news.

Popcorn?

Won’t spend too long on this, but just wanted to button up the Jhug story from last week.

Just as a refresher, he was coming after people for using his precious art on the heinous, disgusting Makooor platform.

Now he has his own platform!! Are we allowed to use Cuddlefish on that? Not sure!

Don’t really have a ton to say here because I’m not going to try downloading something in crypto. Sorry!

I’ll leave you with this banger and we’ll call it a wrap:

Team1 Devrel Vertical

Chimba announced this week that Team1 will be starting a devrel vertical!

Yes I know, “paid shill” “we don’t care about this” blah blah blah.

I know any time you hear “devrel” you think of the people that hated ponzis in Build Games and wonder why it’s relevant to us.

But this is different! This is Team1, the “community” branch of Avalanche, so I think we can expect them to be doing things that actually benefit us.

For example, AVAX recently launched a place for builders to go and get competitive quotes on audits. This is a real service that normal people like you and I can make use of in the future next time we release something:

What if we can get a bigger discount through Team1 DevRel?

Chimba mentioning “AI credits” in his post is very exciting too. Honestly anything that helps people build cool stuff is fine by me.

This could all be a major selling point for bringing devs onto our chain. Not just institutional devs, but ponzi devs as well.

As onchain has a bit of a slowdown now, Team1’s new devrel vertical could be positioned to bring lots of new experimentation to AVAX. Another common Team1 W.

While we’re talking Team1, just want to quickly shoutout the AVAX elephant pants that Frogwell designed for Team1 Thailand. Need these ASAP:

Lore Score

Yes it’s a slow week so I will talk about my own thing! Deal with it!

The main reason why we moved Avalore to a real website and the substack to news.avalore.xyz is so we can start building out tools on the main site.

The Lore Score stuff was something I actually did for Build Games, and then shelved when I got eliminated because I had too much other stuff going on to focus on it.

The main idea was to allow people to reminisce about previous holdings and show off their history:

Of course it will also display your fumbles. Everyone please post some of your own and show Fetakii that he’s not alone.

I tried to make it easy for people to download as a CSV so that future projects can use it for WL and airdrops. More experiments!

Don’t worry, only your “display wallet” is shown publicly. Feel free to connect your side wallets with 20% supply! Your secrets are safe!

Anyway, go test it out here if you haven’t already: https://www.avalore.xyz/score.

Makooor Last Call

Nobs announced the final call for Makooor presale participants to register, so if you’re interested and haven’t already filled out the questions please go do that ASAP.

And no, I don’t know what he means in his question about the token having a floor. Please stop asking me and just put in the same number for both fields like the rest of us.

That’s all the news for this week! Just a cute little article.

As I write this, price is going down a bit so maybe we will get some good drama next week as the people are ornery again.

Tweet of the Week

cant call it lore and miss thst much dude.. add more and ill join the club. ask real ogs

Hello again Avalore enthusiasts!

Things are beginning to calm down as we start entering the holiday season, so we will probably be skipping more weeks moving forward. There’s just not always news!

A little thin this week as well but I really want to avoid skipping two weeks in a row and we did have some funny interactions to discuss.

Let’s do the news!

Cuddlefish IP is Sacred

For those who missed this (idk how, it was the only thing happening on AVAX twitter for 24 hours), artist JHug got mad at one of his holders, Adam, for daring to make a character of his Cuddlefish on the Makooor platform. Wow!

There’s a lot of layers to peel back here.

I will only BRIEFLY go over the IP law portion of this, because frankly I don’t care about it.

JHug insisted that Nobs take down all Cuddlefish characters on his site, claiming that all Cuddlefish NFTs are technically his intellectual property:

Gribbly then went on to question whether the IP rights were formally documented anywhere. By JHugs lack of response, I suspect that they were not.

Again, I don’t know anything, but I would be pretty surprised if selling these images wasn’t a violation of IP rights and not really “fair use” or “commentary” in some form:

But honestly the whole “Intellectual Property” situation is really not even the main problem here.

The real issue is that he sold NFT profile pictures to people, in some cases for thousands of dollars, and is now restricting holders from making memes with their NFTs using AI.

Is he technically within his rights here? Sure, possibly, like I said I have no idea.

But in practice it just seems insane to me. Wouldn’t you want people to spread your brand? Make it their identity?

As someone who has released NFTs in the past, I would be DELIGHTED if people used the NFTs as their persona and started putting them in memes. That’s the whole point!

Please feel free to build your identity around Mambonauts or Humping Unicorns!! You have my permission to put them into memes!

My esteemed partner Frogwell said it best:

There was of course plenty of back and forth in the comments, with both JHug and Moonbags defending their position with leading questions to Grok:

And this response from Moonbags gets to the meat of the disagreement.

To him and JHug, Cuddlefish are Art pieces, with a capital “A”. They are not to be tainted by the likes of Makooor and should be treated with the utmost respect.

To the rest of us, it’s just an NFT that people buy so they can build an online persona around it. It’s not that deep.

Surprising absolutely nobody, Adam promptly changed his PFP to something that he IS free to make memes with.

This is Adam! Recognize him:

After the debate cooled down, JHug posted some cryptic tweets with artifact-heavy AI videos about something called “popcorn.”

I think it’d be hilarious if now that he’s alienated everyone, he announces he’s working on some kind of Makooor-esque AI harness.

Good for him! Hope he does a good job policing IP rights!

AVAX Takes Japan

Team1 announced a new Japan chapter while we were away!

I had the pleasure of meeting some AVAX community members in Japan at one of their events, and it definitely seems like the kind of market that can take off.

(Side note: we’re trying to get our Visa to move back to Japan. I’ll work for free! Call me!)

This is happening at a perfect time, as Makooor’s newest crowned creator, Zey, has been putting out some nonstop Malfoid anime bangers:

Having an anime-focused creator on the team has led to an influx of Japanese users and followers:

Just total domination on the Japan front from Makooor and Team1 as usual.

Could this funnel some new users from Japan onto Avalanche? Will they buy our bags? Will they purchase IP-friendly NFTs to make memes with?

Only time will tell!

That’s all the news I’ve got for this week, so let’s end on the hopeful note that an influx of Japanese users is coming to push prices up.

There’s not a ton going on these days as people seem to be busy with IRL stuff. Or maybe I’m just projecting?

We’ve been hard at work going through the 90000 steps required to set up a business in Japan that qualifies for a visa, as well as visiting with family for birthdays and medical issues.

Thank you to the Campfire team for providing the bulk of the content this week, as is tradition.

Tweet IP Friendly Collection of the Week

Hello again!

Price is still holding above $11, but this will be a shorter article as there was not nearly as much news this week.

Maybe this is good! $11 is the new normal, so it doesn’t have the people worked up as much.

Perhaps we see a large repricing to $20 and an influx of scammers? A guy can dream.

Let’s do the news.

NFT Mints??

AVAX artist NotWarhol has started a run of NFT mints under the project name Stratavax.

It’s a pretty cool idea—the NFT you mint is influenced by your wallet history. The first drop above is a topographical map based on your NFT holdings, and he also released a second drop that was based on your wallet’s transaction history:

I even missed the second mint because it sold out so quickly! People are doing things again!

It just goes to show what we’ve been saying all along. People are still here, and they’re still hungry for things to do.

Warhol has embraced the experimentation arc and has given people buttons to press.

Be more like Warhol! Give me more content!

King Makooor

It was a big week in Makooor world, as the “crowning” program was unveiled.

The first to be crowned was Barbo, who has been an absolute force with the product. He’s also a really nice guy, so go follow him if you haven’t already!

Anyway, Barbo was gifted 5000 (!) credits after being voted as the first to receive the crown. Look for more crownings to come in the future!

We also had the big release of videos on Makooor last week!

Our benevolent leader Nobs made videos fully reimbursable for the first 5 days, so hopefully you had some fun trying out the video generation.

Personally, I spent most of those 5 days trying to get a Snaps yoga video to pass Higgsfield’s moderation. And eventually I got there!

Video is a massive gamechanger for many, so I can’t wait to see what you guys cook up. There’s something beautiful about watching Emin backflip into a canyon.

And back out of the canyon! Not a death thing! There was a trampoline!

Let’s move on.

Pharaoh Turns One

Ok I completely missed this yesterday, so I’m just gonna speedrun it for those of you who like giveaways.

Do yourself a favor and read this thread about how you can win money. He’s giving out a couple thousand dollars just for making meme videos, so if that’s your kind of thing, it’s worth giving it a shot.

Might I suggest using Makooor? Completely unbiased, just an idea! You can use whatever you want!

Also I just opened the $PHAR chart for the first time in a while and holy shit.

Congrats to Pharaoh holders you must be making bank! I am unfortunately underexposed as usual despite it being the only app that I ever make trades on.

That’s all the news I’ve got for this week. Normalize short articles! Sometimes there is no big news!

I will contact TR and tell him to pick some more fights next week.

Tweet of the Week

Well, well, well!

Price boomed immediately after Summit (NYSE using AVAX???) and so AVAX Twitter came alive! As both a drama merchant and AVAX enthusiast, this is really the best timeline for me.

I won’t keep you too long here, just wanted to also say that Kieks has finished adapting all of the first 52 articles for print, so we’re close to ordering a final test of the Avalore coffee table book! Lookout for updates on that soon.

We still want to get them in your hands before Christmas. Nothing like gathering around the fire to read about internet drama and sip eggnog.

Ok! Let’s do the news!

The Most Hated Pump

After AVAX almost 2x’d (!) in the time since the last article, obviously people were bullposting en masse on the timeline. That’s kinda what people do when things are good!

For some reason this seemed to trigger a lot of ETH/SOL people, who took this opportunity to make sure that they could snipe at AVAX and AVAX supporters.

Even the broccoli head weighed in on AVAX’s “irrelevance.”

I’m not entirely sure how AVAX got this reputation. I guess for people who haven’t been here since 2021, to them it’s just another old chain that nobody uses anymore.

If we want to change that perception, I don’t think the best strategy is to bombard these people and take shots back at them.

As we move into AVAX Autumn aka Experimentation Szn, we just need to keep having fun and eventually these people will come over. All it takes is a little motion and they will come crawling back.

We simply post great memes and make lots of money! They will join us eventually.

Tac v Pangolin

Man man man, when will people learn to stop fighting with Tac?? These unforced errors are great for my business, but I’m really not sure what this guy was thinking here.

In case you didn’t notice, that tweet from TR was from NOVEMBER 2025! Almost a year ago!!

And by the way, Blackhole STILL has more TVL than Pangolin. So I guess they are just quoting a year old tweet in order to gloat that they still exist??

Listen, I want to support community guys over Blackhole mercenaries as much as anyone, but what are we doing here??? Maybe they feel some pressure now that Pharaoh has really taken over AVAX’s hearts and minds?

Honestly TR is a bit psychotic so there are too many tweets to cover all of it in here. I’ll try to do a play-by-play.

TR investigated their “volume” and found that most of it was running through a private router from wallets funded by the Pangolin team.

Tbh I expect most protocols do this (see the recent controversy with Kalshi getting called out for something similar) but maybe don’t start fights about it on the timeline?? Maybe just ignore accusations if they’re obviously true???

Then he set his sights on the token itself, noting that the team pays employees in tokens which obviously get sold on the market (last I checked you can’t buy groceries with $PNG yet).

Adam had a pretty long answer to all this, which I will clip for you because you’re not gonna read the whole thing. If you want to read it you can do so here but the highlights are:

So yes, the token is not literally infinite! Clearly Tac was exaggerating here, but Adam wants to set the record straight that there are not in fact infinity tokens for them to vest.

Surely you will take comfort in knowing that they will only ever have 55% of supply to dump on your head! No more!

Then he specifies that not only do they pay the team in PNG, they also fund their entire operations by selling the token. Another comforting thought!

Don’t worry though, it’s all decentralized! The community decides when the team gets to take their pay, and how much.

What’s that? The majority of the votes come from the PNG team themselves?

I thought we kind of all agreed that this DAO stuff was a scam and had moved past it, but I guess there are still some people out there that believe in decentralized governance.

Maybe it’s time to open up applications for Frens DAO? Unfortunately, your voting power will be determined by whether or not your name is Excel, Nobs, or Smitty. Decentralization!

Ok this one isn’t even really a refutation, he’s just combatting by talking about all-time numbers. Idk, we’ve spent too long on this topic already.

Suffice it to say the Pangolin team, like the Kalshi team, is hopefully learning the benefit of being less aggressive on the timeline towards the unemployed.

They also took some shots at him for being “anonymous,” I guess forgetting the space that they’re in. But hey, I’m anonymous too! Look at me hiding behind it!

Fresh Rugs

There was a brief moment during the pump where people rushed to capitalize on the new attention AVAX was getting. There were coins launched on Robinhood paired with AVAX, and then there was this $LIKE coin launched by Ruggy Fresh on AVAX

If you haven’t learned who you can trust in this ecosystem by now, I’m not sure what to tell you! But hopefully this is a good lesson on avoiding clear opportunistic plays.

Thankfully it looks like only $400 worth of stupidity was on display today. Nice! We’re getting smarter!

Respect to him for putting in some real time (3 hours) bagworking this one before abandoning it though.

Pharaoh Stays Winning

Just wanted to highlight this as I thought it was a pretty slick move from Hillbilly and the Pharaoh team. Side note, I have finally learned how to spell this word without looking it up!

Anyway, in case you didn’t hear, the Bitget exchange was hacked for over $100M this week. The hackers then withdrew a bunch of native currencies to their respective chains, including over $8M of AVAX on C-Chain.

The team at Pharaoh realized this, and in anticipation of the incoming dump from the hackers they cranked up the volatility fees on their AVAX pairs.

Because Pharaoh contains the large majority of AVAX liquidity on chain, the hackers would have no choice but to dump their $500k clips into the pool with increased fees.

This probably wouldn’t have effected us normal users as our $20 sells buys would just be routed to a smaller pool with lower fees (volume for Pangolin!!).

Not everyone was happy with this move though.

I like Sindermann so I will acknowledge his point here.

Personally I think this argument falls apart quickly. Say they hadn’t cranked the fees up, are they still responsible to pay fees generated by the hacked money back to the victims? How would that even work?

IMO the sole blame lays on Bitget here. They lost the money, they should be responsible for making their users whole, not the DEX that clawed some of that money away from the hacker.

I see Sindermann’s point and perhaps it would be more “moral” to use the increased fees to somehow reimburse Bitget users, but idk this is crypto, not a charity! Code is law! Or something.

Good on LHB for looking out for his own users, and I have no issue with them trying to make the most of the cards they were dealt.

That’s all the news I’ve got for this week!

It’s been a busy time in our household as our dog was in the hospital for surgery, but he is now on the mend and requires constant monitoring to keep him from jumping on the couch (impossible task).

We had a nice little helping of drama this week, let’s keep this same energy going into the next one! And maybe another 2x in price? That’d be cool.

Tweet Discord Message of the Week

Good morning!

After a few days of boots-on-the-ground info gathering at Summit, I am both mentally and physically exhausted. I’m writing this on the train back home to try and get it out on time. It will be late and maybe poor quality. Sorry!

Let’s talk Summit.

Wrath Tank

The star of Summit week was undoubtedly our lovable scamp, Wrath. He has left the anon life behind in a major way, and given us enough meme fuel to get all the way to next year’s event.

The memes came early and often, with the crown jewel of course being his participation in a KOL cult initiation ceremony:

It’s always been a little frustrating to see who the “AVAX cult” is at these events (I only recognize 3 people in this photo) but it was nice to see one of our own included this time.

I read some posts complaining about the people who get invited to things like the influencer dinners and backstage rooms, etc etc. I sympathize with these!

Of course I would have liked to meet Mr. Wonderful too, and part of me is salty that these KOLs get the VIP treatment. If you’re reading this and in that group I’m probably not talking about you though! Shoutout Swanny/Ashley/Vanho for always being friendly and making an effort to mix it up with the community.

I get it, it’s all an attention game. In the end I can’t fault them for bringing in these people to gain exposure. It’s a hard thing to measure, so I won’t pretend to know if it’s worth it.

I think if we are going to try and get more community members to these events in the future, a good first step would be making the average Joe’s of AVAX feel more special. More on that later!

Either way, it was cool to see Wrath included amongst the VIPs this time around, and he most certainly delivered on the content front.

This week we are all Grotto residents.

Business!

Summit was in fact as business-oriented as advertised! I was in jeans and a t-shirt most of the time and was almost certainly under-dressed.

After talking with people there, it seems that this is how all crypto conferences are these days—it’s not just an AVAX thing. As we’ve said in this space before, the industry as a whole is growing up, and that means more suits.

This is a double edged sword of course, as it probably pushed many of you readers away from attending. After a quick look at the speaking sessions and the audience, it was clear that us C-Chain ponzi enthusiasts would be taking a back seat this time around.

There was a panel with prominent builders from the community that was my highlight of the conference itself, and the Grotto x Team1 party was the best part of my week. My wife, Kieks, came up just for that party!

I don’t want this to be a negative section though. While it’s not what I personally look for in an event, there are of course many positives to the business focus.

I’ve seen tons of tweets about how “high-signal” of an event this was, and I don’t doubt it.

At the end of the day it’s tough to run a heavy business event and get the community excited about it, so I understood why many of my friends from last year’s Summit didn’t feel like coming to this one.

This was perhaps most evidenced by my brief time watching Luigi eat hot wings on stage.

I was late to this particular session (thank you Voh for getting me to come watch for content), and when I walked in there was another woman who sat down right next to me.

She was surprised to see what was happening on stage, and asked “What are they doing, eating hot wings??”

I explained that yes, it’s an interview over wings, modeled after a popular YouTube series.

She quickly stood up, said “Oh. This is not what I’m here for” and left.

This is why we can’t have nice things! She is emblematic of why it’s so hard to please the community and also court businesses at the same time.

She lost in the end though because she missed Luigi at his best. The spice was clearly getting to his head because when asked what his favorite thing about AAVE was, he responded “I love that it makes money.”

More hot wings interviews next Summit please! Don’t let that woman win!

I think in the future it might be cool to have completely separate events with different focuses (community summit in March, business summit in September?). I got to speak with some people about this, and it seems possible. We are contracted by AVAX now! We can help make these things happen!

The People

For me, Summit has been and always will be about the people. As I said earlier, I was sad to have fewer friends there this year than last year.

That being said, it was still a great time meeting with the people that did make the trip. There’s something really special about grabbing a beer with people you interact with every day.

In a sea of nameless suits, it was a joy to look down at someone’s name tag and have it be recognizable. I got to talk at length with new friends, old friends, and even people that I’ve been critical of in the past.

I might sometimes go after people here and on the timeline, but meeting up in person is a reminder that we’re all on the same team.

Overall, even though there were fewer community members at this event, it was great to see those of you that showed up.

We got to do some good business as well! Shoutout Matias, Nahas, and Chimba for all the great conversations. Looking forward to the future, fellow coworkers!

I guess that’s it for my Summit recap! Overall I had a great time, and despite my initial hesitancy I’m glad I came. Oh I forgot to mention the food was amazing too—brisket on the first day, tacos and gyros on the second day. Nice work, events team!

Ferdy Ponz

Ponz game was also a fun storyline to monitor throughout the event, with people checking their Ponz every hour. Congrats to the winner, Chart Shaman, who took home almost 2000 AVAX! That’s a validator right there!

It was a wild ride, with 4 last minute surrenders leading to Shaman being crowned champion.

Overall there were much fewer surrenders than expected, with the math heads really going hard on optimizing their play (never surrender). The people are BEGGING for ponzis to hold to zero, and this was a nice start to experimentation szn.

The timing with Summit was perfect, and gave us a little storyline whether or not you made it to the event.

I took a strong “Schrödinger’s Ponz” approach, trying to check as little as possible so that in my head I was still in the game. I was devastated to wake up this morning to a message from professional buzzkill, Tactical Retreat, letting me know that all my ponz were dead.

It was not a completely ruined morning though, as I also woke up to this message from my dad:

So overall I am leaving Summit hopeful for our future!

We’re excited to have a chance to make a difference with Frens DAO, and this event just added to that excitement.

It’s hard not to be positive after talking with so many cool people that all want AVAX to succeed.

Even though it might not always feel this way, we really are more aligned than it seems.

Tweet of the Week

Hello! Big week!!!

Excel, Nobs, and I are excited to announce Frens DAO—a collective that will work with all branches of AVAX to help make C-Chain great again!!!1!!1!

That’s right folks, we have been brought on to bring back the fun! Gone are the days of emploids asking us to define “fun.” We know what it is! And we will bring it here!

Why not set the tone with a nice rage bait anonymous new account intro post? GOT HEEEEEEEM

Shoutout John Nahas and Chimba/Team1 specifically for believing in us and being the driving forces behind making this happen. Common Team1 W.

So this is the first emploid article??

Nothing should really change with Avalore, except now when I’m being critical of Ava Labs, it means I’m also being critical of myself! Oh no!

Let’s discuss this very exciting (we hope) news!

Frens DAO???

A very mysterious organization by the name of Frens DAO posted about working with Avalabs on the community. But who are they?? What do they know about the community???

That’s right, it’s us! The community!!!

We have successfully infiltrated Ava Labs (and FDN and Team1) and will be trying our hardest to push a community friendly agenda. The C-Chain has been in the dark for far too long, and we will make it our mission to bring it into the light.

So what does that mean exactly?

Well, to be honest we’re still figuring it out. We have direct communication lines to all branches of the AVAX tree, so we have a lot of access and flexibility.

We’ll be working with Labs comms teams to help bridge the gap between the institutional side of the chain and the degen side.

We’ll be working with FDN on ACPs, incentive programs, and ways to bring more users on chain however we can.

We will also be working with Team1 supporting their incredible community work. Shoutout Team1 for already being on the right path, we shouldn’t have much to do there.

Maybe some fun events? Community “Summit” golf trip?

It’s interesting because we’ve been trying to get this deal done for a few months now, so we’ve been meeting with all kinds of people at Labs/FDN/Team1 (yes I will make sure to keep them separate now! Separate entities!!!).

Nobody is as I would have expected. It seems like they really do care about the community and would like us to thrive. They just need a little help, as that hasn’t always been obvious (lol).

Even our announcement strategy was balked at by our new colleagues. “Should we really invite fud?” “Will it just be confusing?” “Just announce individually on your socials!”

It’s time to get back to having fun. This is our main goal. We know that the community does not have a ton of goodwill towards Labs (or FDN) these days, so we will be in the trenches trying to rebuild this relationship.

Overall, we’re REALLY excited for this next chapter. Lmao that sounds so emploid my god. But seriously.

It’s a temporary thing to start as both sides are feeling out how we’ll work together, but we’re all hopeful that we can bring some of the excitement back. It can’t all be from the top-down though, we need the community’s support. We will be working hard to give you guys more things to rally around.

So how do we do that?

AVAX Szn is Coming

I have long believed that AVAX is home to some of the smartest and most unique minds in all of crypto. We will be working hard to foster experimentation, and create an environment where C-Chain is the place to be for cutting edge ponzis gamified financialization.

Nobs has already started gathering different developers and setting them on projects. Experimentation Autumn is nearly upon us folks, let’s build some cool shit.

Every other chain is pushing the same business narrative and neglecting their community. This was not just an AVAX problem, it’s literally EVERYWHERE. I mean look what happened to poor old MegaETH. It’s RWAs all the way down, folks.

All it took was the founder of Robinhood not outright attacking memes for it to become the degen chain.

But then the gas was expensive, and the chain even completely shut down. What if we just do it better here? Surely we have the technology.

So why not get started with…

Survive mfers, survive

Ferdy Ponz is now live! I really enjoyed ponz game the first time around. The only downside was that it allowed Wrathtank to rise to prominence, thus turning every AVAX group chat into a Grotto shill chat.

Outside of that, it was fun to watch and see if your character lived or died every day, and of course you have to dunk on the people who surrender early (never surrender (that’s not financial advice (I am now contractually obligated to steer away from monetary talk (please don’t fire me for this)))).

It looks like we have a nice little prize pool developing, and this should time well with Summit.

Which I am now going to!!! I was going to boycott it because there’s no dunk tank, but interestingly enough most of the dunkable people are now gone! Funny.

Anyway, this is just the first thing down the pipe. A nice little appetizer if you will. A palate cleanser.

C-Chain has been getting a bit moldy, a bit stale. It’s time we got some new bread.

It’s been a busy week (I have a job now!) so that’s all I’ve got for you guys.

We have an uphill battle ahead of us for sure, but we now have the access to try and enact real change. We hope you’ll be patient and support us as we work on this. We will be your men on the inside, your representatives. Not that you elected us, but hopefully we can represent you well anyway.

Tweet of the Week

One year!! 52 articles!!!1!1!!

I can’t believe there have been 52 of these bad boys. For those of you who have been reading these since the beginning, thank you so much for your support. For those who joined us along the way, it’s great to have you here.

As you may have seen in the tweet, we’ve been working really hard on a PHYSICAL BOOK containing the first 52 Avalore articles! We’re still waiting to quality control some test copies, and it’s been a major hassle to adapt the whole thing for print. Kieks has been painstakingly arranging every article to make it look amazing.

The book will be around 200 pages—a beefy coffee table piece. It will probably be priced accordingly, as these things are not cheap to make, but we will hopefully be opening presale orders once we have the price nailed down. They’ll be in your hands before the end of the year, possibly sooner. Exciting!

Obviously we couldn’t get it fully complete until this last article was out. This line is gonna be in the book! Hi mom!

Ok that’s enough yapping. For the 52nd time, let’s do some news.

Ghosts of AVAX Past

We’ve had a lot of old AVAX projects ramping up tweets all at the same time for some reason, the most notable of which is Steady.

I was admittedly never a Stead-head, as I didn’t really believe in the founder or any of the bs Hyperspace launches for that matter. But good news! There’s a new founder in town!

Wow! Congrats Avery on making the tried and true transition from Avalabs emploid to NFT collection CTO leader! Despite my initial aversion to the collection, there’s no denying that it had the strongest (only?) community of those Hyperspace projects so there might actually be something to build on here.

Also Avery has been putting in some serious work on the content generation front and pumping out cool videos from the project’s account. At least I assume it is him using AI to make these. Either way the videos are pretty nice—go check them out!

I’m not sure what will happen here, but it has brought some life to the AVAX eco so I’m happy to see it continue.

On the other hand, something I am NOT happy to see come back is Looty.

I won’t rehash too much history here, but basically this project failed in almost every way and was incredibly low effort. You can read Tac’s multi-part postmortem here if you want a chuckle.

It did give us some all-time drama when three unnamed individuals managed to hack their shitty contracts and steal every single NFT inside. White hat of course! No malice! Everything was returned!!

Anyway, the old team left and a new team took over the project. I don’t remember if they’ve done anything since then, but I assume they’re still in charge?

They ran a Twitter space fielding questions after the acquisition, and my only memory is that I went up to ask “So why did you acquire Looty instead of starting fresh with a new platform” to which they responded “Looty has a really strong brand history that we wanted to make use of.”

Ok! Good luck with that!

It also appears that ThaDream is involved in some way. You may remember him from bringing a bunch of Solana KOLs to last Summit and shoehorning a list of shitty creators into the Wink presale so they could dump on our heads. Good luck again!

Speaking of Wink, I have to take some time to make fun of Goose here.

I consider him a friend (pls don’t hate me) but what an absolutely insane thing to tweet!

You can’t just launch a token for a project you’re building, work on that project for a year and a half, then change the name and suddenly say the whole thing was developed before launch!

Ahahahaha, honestly it’s a great grift. I have a smile on my face just thinking about it.

Regardless, the Wink Everdraw project actually looks pretty sick and I’m excited to see what the full version turns into. He has been working really hard on it before launching anything (LOL) and the work shows in the demo. Jokes aside, it’s truly high quality. Keep an eye out!

Keep an eye out … Wink … get it? You got it.

VQ vs Justin

We kind of missed this story as it was while I was on break, but if you’re reading this I’m sure you’re aware that Justin put out a sad story about how he was in danger of losing his home, and asking if people would be willing to support by sending money.

This ended up being quite successful, and he was sent around $15k! Wow!!!

He transferred $4k immediately to Coinbase to pay the month’s rent, but then started opening up AVAX long positions at the same time. Man man MAN!

I don’t want to bash him too hard because clearly he’s having a shit time right now, but if you’re at the point where you’re asking people for money online you should not be gambling. And yes, trading is gambling no matter how you slice it.

This is a particularly sore subject for me as last year I loaned someone money only to find out that they had lost the entire loan trading. I have no sympathy for these kinds of people anymore. It’s a lesson you only learn once.

So I don’t know, I hope he makes it through this, and I hope he stops trading until he does.

Please remember to take profits people! Remember that everything we do is in the 99th percentile of risks and plan accordingly. If you make life changing money, let it change your life. And never risk anything that you can’t afford to lose.

A Wonderful AVAX Summit

In more positive news, Kevin O’Leary is speaking at AVAX Summit!!!!

I can’t stress how exciting this is for me. I used to watch Shark Tank a ton growing up, so to have someone this prominent speaking at the conference is really cool. I now must go to try and get a pic with him.

That being said, he’s also a hilarious choice to headline this event. Known for being a humongous asshole (for those who don’t know him, the “Mr Wonderful” nickname is of course sarcastic), he is frequently saying negative things about crypto assets that are not named BTC.

Even just this week, ONE DAY after being named the headliner for Avalanche Summit, he went on a news show and said that “BTC and Ethereum are the only two assets that matter, the other 10,000 coins are in the toilet and will stay there.”

LOL honestly you can’t draw it up any better than that, remarkable.

There is a silver lining in the second part of his statement though. He said that the S&P 500 will be coming on chain and we should be buying the blockchain that will support that. He says that means “probably” Ethereum, but I’m choosing to believe that in the back of his mind he KNOWS it’s AVAX. He just doesn’t want to tip his cap before he’s loaded the bag.

Mr Wonderful is buying our coins!

Also I’d love to be a fly on the wall in that speaker room while Wrath is trying to pitch him a 2000’s style horror game indie platform. Can I apply for a media pass? How does that work?

Anyway, that’s all the news for this week! Thanks again for sticking with us through 52 articles! I can’t believe this has gone on for so long.

Stay on the lookout for the official Avalore book coming to a coffee table near you soon!!! Very excited about this, we get some of the first test copies on Monday.

Tweet of the Week

Gbiz!

The team has been nonstop grinding trying to get [REDACTED] ready for Avalore’s one year anniversary next week! Well it’s not technically one year (longer!) but you know what I mean. 52 articles, 52 weeks in the year, you get the picture.

Anyway, we’re working on something REALLY cool for you guys. At least we think so. And it’s been a ton of work so even if you don’t think it’s cool please react as if you do.

Thank you for your attention to this matter. Let us do the news.

Ferdy Presale Continues

I want to reiterate that I have no idea what’s happening with this. But regardless, people are still being accepted, denied, and put in pendingfi hell.

As is always the case with presales, random people from across the globe are trying to scam their way into a token that they can immediately dump for grocery money. We’ve got some good content out of this sucker whether or not it actually launches.

Jason Learned Nothing

Another quick hitter, and I won’t bash Jason too hard since we went in on this last week, but immediately after leading the community to a rugging on the Matt Furie token he has started retweeting NFTs that he apparently has done zero research on??

Why are we doing this?? Just ignore the random 1/1s people make you! It’s not hard! Maybe he does know the team and is slow playing it? That would make sense, I guess we’ll see.

That’s all I’ll say on this matter! Normalize short article sections!

Pool Stays Closed

Let’s pop over to Robinhood chain for our main story of the week. Again, I am not too involved there yet but a bunch of my friends were in this one so I will try to do it justice.

Also shoutout Moonbags! He’s apparently working on his 404 launchpad again (I believe Wrath has some features to request) and pushing some new project? I assume it’s his new PFP?

Anyway, this token $CLOSED was launched and worked on by a bunch of AVAX people, most notably Avery “not that Avery” Bigweapon.

The idea of the token is actually pretty funny—you can go to its website and launch a new $CLOSED token on a launchpad (pools.fun). Because of this, the launchpad was completely filled with different Pools Closed launches. At this point, over 1000 new “closed” tokens have been launched there. Fun!

Anyway, the devs of pools.fun did NOT think this was fun at all! Apparently this launchpad is from the Sushiswap team, and they didn’t like that Uniswap devs were supporting $CLOSED. Dex wars!!!!

At the time, this was one of the only tokens with any sort of volume on their launchpad, so taking such an aggressive stance against a fun idea is a bold move, Cotton.

Eventually they went on to blacklist all $CLOSED tokens from their website, even the main one!

Like Smoothies says above, a memecoin launcher removing a memecoin is hilarious. It was not some tiny token either, it was #2 on their launchpad at around 300k Mcap. Jason and the Arena would have killed for that kind of organic runner!

After removing all traces of the token from their website, they then went on to try to push some obviously fed-planted “OPEN” token:

That token of course speedran to zero, and now everyone hates pools.fun and by extension Sushiswap. The end!

There’s a New Sheriff in Town

We have a new president! Say goodbye to John Wu’s pearly whites and hello to Charley!

I don’t know anything about him other than the fact that he looks SUSPICIOUSLY like Dom, but he just created a Twitter account so it’s nice to see him get a warm welcome and already be put in some memes.

And most importantly, token has pumped almost 20% since he took office! Let’s go Charley!! Always believed in you!!!

Speaking of the pump, we were all vibing and having a good time but the space’s resident broccoli floret had to come and rain on our parade:

I can’t speak much for Sui or Sei really, but it’s unfortunate that the crypto cognoscenti (there’s your word of the day, VQ) sees AVAX like this.

Why the animosity? They look at us the way we look at Aptos or Polygon. How can we change this? Food for thought for the future.

That’s all the news for this week! Stay tuned for some fun announcements from the Avalore team coming soon™!

Tweet of the Week

We are BACK baby!!

I took a nice few weeks off, sprinkled in some guest articles (thanks again Nobs, Excel, and Hem), and now I’m feeling fresh and ready for the next 50 articles. Ok well maybe not 50, but you know what I mean.

Going to try to start on POSITIVITY ARC for now! It’s too tiring to be negative. Beating dead horses and all that. Let’s get back to our roots of drama and fun.

We’ve had some stuff happening onchain to talk about while I was gone! Just not really on our chain I guess? But hey, AVAX is a community, not a chain.

Let’s do some news!!!! First time long time!1!!1!

Makoooooooooooor

Wow it’s been so long since we’ve had a news article, makooor released a month ago and we haven’t talked about it yet!

Makooor is Nobs’ newest vibecoded fever dream, and it’s actually pretty cool!

If you haven’t tried it out yet, it’s basically an AI harness that keeps track of your own characters and makes them easy to put into sharable meme templates.

This sharable aspect is really cool—nothing like seeing all the lads rally together, smiling through it all with the same template.

Ok but this is not a makooor ad! This is a news article! So that should get you caught up on the product. Nobs also announced that he will be launching some kind of Makooor presale.

There’s not a ton of info on this yet, but it never hurts to register! The product seems to have a real working business model (business!), and thus some revenue (revenue!!!!), so there may be something here.

I’m on the team so I’m biased, but it will be fun to see how this gets refined in the coming weeks. Important to remember that this is still vibecoded. I believe Tac is bullying the code into something a normal person can read, and then we can start polishing it.

The Bandana Stays On

The AVAX community has spent a lot of time on Robinhood while we’ve been away, so we have a couple juicy news stories from there!

The major story of the week was of course the $BOYZ token that launched on Arena. It had a decent pump and was allegedly endorsed by artist Matt Furie.

For some context, Matt has been known to soft-align with tokens many times in the past, usually later claiming that his twitter was “hacked” and disappearing into the void before returning to do it again.

In fact, I hadn’t been following the story too closely but people are saying it’s the third time it happened THIS WEEK. Yes you read that right! This week!!1!!

So why were people buying this token? How is he able to run it back over and over and still get buyers? Surely everyone is wise to his tricks by now and people would be avoiding these things right? RIGHT???

What’s that? The token was pushed by the launchpad founder even though the comments for Furie’s post were literally disabled at the time? And everyone in the comments was saying it was a scam?? And then it turned out to be a scam????

So yeah, eventually Furie did his usual and claimed his twitter was hacked, and the token promptly took a nosedive.

I want to credit Jason a bit here because he did own the mistake and even had a 2 hour space on Arena explaining the situation from his perspective.

Do not worry, readers! I sat through the whole space so you don’t have to! I even took notes! Busy first week back on the job.

Jason ended up being close with the team that launched the token (some traders from Solana?) and had “extreme confidence” that this was definitely Matt Furie behind his own account.

He rightly stated that the only thing important for a launchpad is to have runners and make people money, and the Furie coin appeared to have done that. All his metrics were exploding, so he wanted to stoke the flames and keep a good thing going.

Eventually, Furie started making obscene monetary demands, and even Jason got more involved to try and work something out. In the end, Matt wouldn’t budge.

Jason got more forceful, and that’s when Matt claimed he got hacked and shut everything down.

From Jason’s perspective, this was a chance to go all in and secure a runner for his launchpad, possibly breaking out into the mainstream crypto zeitgeist.

However, as my friend Nobs Fud would say, “don’t raise with shitty cards!” A token pushed by a known scammer is almost definitely a shitty card.

Yes, Jason knew that Matt was in control of the account, but does it really matter?

It’s hard to think of an equivalent scenario to this. Maybe it’s like if you had insider knowledge that it was really Dwight Howard launching an NFT collection and pushed that. Or it could be like supporting a PolitiFi token from the REAL Robert F. Kennedy Jr! Or supporting some kind of BOI token from someone who is known to doxx others, send out death threats, and then rug.

Oh ok, I guess there is precedent on AVAX for this.

Anyway, Jason tried to shoot his shot with this one and gas up a runner. I can’t really blame him for that, but I CAN blame him for shooting this particular shot.

He is still clearly close with the team, making statements like “well the token is still up and the team is still working hard” and “I know it sucks to hear but a lot of people made money on this too.”

Are the people who made money on this in the room with us?

Inside of You There Are Two Wolves

Anyway, that’s enough dunking. We’re staying positive!

We had some good news on Robinhood as well, as Gribbly released a coin that dinged $10M mcap!

Pretty cool, and I think a bunch of people made some good money on this one. Or at least had the chance to make some good money before Frank Degods dumped on their heads.

That’s pretty sweet though! AVAX people are breaking into the real crypto conversation! The coin was marketed as being from a dev who launched a $400M mcap coin in the past, and people from outside our eco jumped into it.

I will choose not to be as pessimistic as Giraffe here and see the positives in this. The AVAX community is, as the kids say, “goated,” and with the right support it could really flourish.

We’ve been talking about the strength of the community for a while, but this is really just further confirmation. We have something special here, and I wonder if there’s a way to make AVAX standout as a community chain in a time where most other chains are turning their backs on crypto natives in favor of “business.”

Pretty much all it took for Robinhood to gain this perception was for the founder to softly endorse the degen side of crypto instead of getting on stages saying “Gone are the days when you could invest in a memecoin, and that's a welcome change.”

And maybe don’t highlight his comments and support them from the main account that people who use the chain will be looking to! Just an idea!

Anyway, positivity!!! Like I said, the community here is really something unique. I wouldn’t have been able to write 50 (!) of these articles if it wasn’t. This whole Robinhood arc is just proof that the community-centric style CAN work, especially with our community in particular.

Ferdy????

Speaking of our community, VQ has tweeted that the Ferdy presale allocations are open! The form has some VERY interesting questions that seem to determine your allocation size:

I know what you’re thinking, “Smitty, why don’t you have more info for us on the token? When is it releasing? Is this a bait?”

And honestly, I can’t answer those! When it comes to my esteemed psychotic co-workers VQ and Nobs, I find it’s best to just stay along for the ride and enable them where I can.

I’m not sure if a token will be released. If it is, we will try to do it correctly. Or in a way that makes us the most money, I don’t know. Important to remember:

And that’s all I’ve got for this week! It actually was a nice, meaty article to welcome me back. Keep it coming! More excitement next week too please!

Tweet of the Week

Just wanted to make sure everyone saw this one. Congrats to Fish for inventing trading!

Excited for this new “primitive” where you make money when price goes up, and lose money when price goes down.

Hi. I’m Hemlock. Since my recent return to the fifth circle of hell, also known as X (previously Twitter), - yes, that is the platform’s full legal name - you may have seen me shitposting from the handle chthonicOrchid. This brain dump of an article is an earnest attempt to provide answers and mental scaffolding for the Avalanche “community” on a topic of discussion near and dear to all of our hearts.

Though the conclusions drawn are likely applicable to other chains as well, our focus will remain on Avalanche. The topic at hand is that Avalanche (pause for applause) is for business.

Guest writers and Smitty alike have beaten this dead horse of a topic well and truly deep into the dirt. I, however, being a pretentious know-it-all, felt that a moratorium was in order.

And so I stand here before you all with shovel in hand, prepared to exhume this rotting, bloated corpse of a conversation in the hopes another few swings against the well-shattered ribcage of this rhetorical ungulate might yield some scraps of wisdom.

Instead of focusing on figures, graphs, or any sort of competent financial evaluation of this business-forward strategy, this article’s emphasis will be on relationships between groups of people. Three groups in particular, which for ease of reference will be assigned a witty and snappy moniker.

The first group, which we will call "the Emploids'' is, to put it plainly, the people who hold true sway within the Foundation and Ava Labs. This group should be understood to be the employees and executives of the Avalanche Foundation with actual decision-making power, those who come up with the big picture business strategy of the Avalanche project and delegate to others to enact those strategies.

These are not lowly engineers, code monkeys, PR hires, social media managers, or other employees. They are team leads, managers, and executives. For ease of reference, Emin himself is within this group.

The second group is you: bagholders "the Community". Retail investors, degenerate gambling addicts, buildoooors, and independent validator node operators. These people are, in some sense, the primary userbase of the Avalanche network, some of whom have a vested financial interest in the broader success of Avalanche.

More often, this group generally holds an interest in a higher average price per AVAX token. You are more than likely in the "Community" group if you are reading this article. If you’re not: hi! I promised Smitty I’d to be nice to you.

Our third and final group, "the Suits" can then be understood as those individuals who work within and hold substantial sway in any current or potential enterprise customers or partners of the Foundation. These are people who comprise institutional forces and corporate entities that are in the process of being courted by the Foundation.

This group is not static, but relevant or high profile members of the Suits would be the executive and managerial class within Hyundai, FIFA, BlackRock, and RWA tokenization firms/entities. There are many more than provided as examples, and I’m sure more will be announced as I write this article.

The aforementioned oversimplified narrative is as such: There exists a social gap or disconnect - pick which word feels best for you! - between the Emploids and the Community. There also exists a stronger social association or similarity between the Emploids and the Suits.

Both of these factors are relevant (in my opinion) to explain a meaningful contributing factor to the Foundation’s current business-forward strategies.

What do I mean by social gap?

So what do I even mean when I say this stuff? What does this gap look like? Why care? Should I talk to my doctor about those chest pains I’ve been having? How can I be so sure that this particular approach of diagnosing the problems that plague the Avalanche ecosystem is even relevant or correct?

Good questions, and ones I endeavour to answer with just enough of an air of legitimacy that Smitty may consider inviting me to write some more academic slop for this esteemed, luxurious column.

A social gap - for the purposes of this article - can be understood as a lack of common objective or shared perspective between two groups of people. The clearest examples of this social phenomenon can be found in simple dichotomies or groups which have clearly opposite interests. Police and criminals, a logging company’s executives and environmental activists, vegans and livestock farmers, you get the general idea.

Two groups do not necessarily need to have such clearly opposite interests for a disconnect to occur. A combination of unrelated interests, differences of ethnicity, language, faith, wealth, where an individual lives, how they speak, how they dress, etc. are all contributing factors to whether two groups of people will be more or less likely to lack a common understanding of one another.

Why does this matter? How can I be sure?

To put it bluntly, you, the bagholder, are not like them. Individuals within the Emploid group have little in common on an interpersonal level with individuals within the Community group. To use Emin again as an easy example of a member of the Emploids: Emin isn’t in your group chats. He doesn’t really get your jokes, he probably doesn’t think the memes about him being hot are very funny. (Ask Nobs!) Scandalous, I know.

The guy doesn’t even run his own Twitter account. Emin is a Princeton alum, worked at Bell Labs, was a professor at Cornell. What exactly does he have in common with the unwashed masses demanding another memecoin szn? Why exactly would he himself care?

I am emphasizing this lack of real connection or interpersonal understanding between the Emploids (Emin, in the given example) and the Community to illustrate that what is obvious from the perspective of retail investors is not necessarily what is obvious or even desirable for those atop the ivory tower.

If the social dynamic between the Emploids and the Community can be described as a state of relative social disconnect, then the dynamic between the Emploids and the Suits can be comparatively described as connection. Burgeoning, not yet fully entrenched, but a connection nonetheless; there is a clear desire for that connection to continue from the perspective of the Emploids.

Those individuals who are higher-ups at FIFA, BlackRock, and Hyundai are people who share a social class with the Foundation’s higher-ups. The interests of the Emploids and the Suits are generally more aligned when compared to the interests of the Community and the Emploids, or the Community and the Suits.

The lifestyles of these higher-ups are generally comparable. These people share a social bubble together. They may have attended the same schools, might vacation in the same places, and importantly: they all understand their own position within a social hierarchy. They are like one another. They are, to be blunt once more, not like you.

Private equity and corporate entities becoming the focus of the Foundation’s business strategy is not an accident or an occurrence of chance, or an exclusively financially motivated venture. There is a clear desire from crypto institutions to be taken seriously and be respected by those they consider to be their peers.

There is a want to be invited into important rooms where important people make important decisions about important business matters, to possess their fair share in the distribution of the power that is inherent to money, commerce, and technology. After all, it is who you know that matters most in the realm of important business.

Why should I care?

Financial evaluation of the business-forward approach is left as an exercise to the reader. What I am here to communicate is a part of the why that has gone under-discussed, and the most repeated, pleaded why I have seen usually goes something like this:

Why can the Foundation not do both? Why can’t they appeal to us and to them, work with both their actual userbase and their institutional peers?

I won’t sugarcoat it. I believe this is, among other reasons, because the Foundation would be taken less seriously by the Suits if they funded a memecoin szn, or gave grants out to Giraffe for his NFT collection or took similar community-focused actions.

To put it another way: we are now the side hoe. The Foundation is trying to get with an Ivy League baddie and cannot be seen with us in public, lest they be thought less of by her friends. It is trade-up time, and we are not good for optics.

There are of course constraints of labour hours and limited resources to be considered here too: the Foundation does not have unlimited capital expenditure. They need to focus on what they believe is their best long term survival strategy, and entwining themselves into as many tradfi and other generally institutional business dealings as possible may be their best route to achieve longevity.

I will state for the final time that I don’t know if that assessment is correct, and I’m transparently unequipped to evaluate that matter. What I do know is that while that particular goal is pursued, morale observably plummets for the rest of us, and token price falls with it.

Token price is of course the most glaring consequence of the shift in the Foundation’s approach from the perspective of the community - and the focus of many a snarky reply to Foundation business announcements on Twitter. The erosion of value for the network’s token is I feel, a somewhat predictable consequence of decreased belief in the Foundation from both community insiders and casual retail investors watching from afar.

To reiterate once more: the gap in common understanding between the Emploids and the Community contributes to the Emploids deprioritizing or becoming apathetic to the potential detrimental effects of their new way of organizing their efforts.

This apathy harms the financial prospects of the userbase, which dampens demand for retail level investment into the token, which in turn contributes to the AVAX token’s depreciation relative to the rest of the market.

While the Community may not see the harm in chucking liquidity into memecoins or giving grants to aesthetically ‘unserious’ projects, the Emploids - perhaps rightfully, from their own perspective - do see harm in such an act beyond simple capital expenditure. It would make them appear unprofessional within the social context of desiring to court institutional, governmental, or traditional financial partnerships.

Well now what?

What is to be done with this information? Unfortunately, I can’t say much that wouldn’t be an act of repetition. I can preach about the Foundation needing to communicate better, how they need to open up more to us and be honest about their intentions, but we’ve tried that dialogue before. We’re likely trying it again, right now, as this article is being written.

There are dysfunctional elements to the relationship between the Community and the Emploids, this much is irrefutable. The extent to which this dysfunction is directly responsible for worsened financial outcomes for the foundation and the userbase is a matter of debate and no sure thing. Perhaps they believe this will all be worth it, short term pain for long term gain. This is yet to be seen.

All I know is that for now, we are watching across the bar as our (hot) ex tries pickup lines on people far, far out of our league, and when we try to walk over to say hi, they act like we’ve never met.

crash out? no…burn out

I could open this edition with a proposal number. I’m opening with a feeling instead, because that’s actually what this past week was.

One of the most visible community leaders this ecosystem has announced his last day on the C-chain this week. 17K impressions, 248 likes, 136 replies, and within the hour half of crypto twitter was in his mentions trying to figure out if it was even real. That reaction tells you everything. When someone has carried sentiment for an entire chain for this long, for free, people genuinely cannot process the idea of him putting it down.

And I want to talk about him less as a person and more as a case study, because what happened to him is what happens to every community leader in this ecosystem eventually if nothing changes.

Here’s the pattern he named on his way out: a hopeful DM from Avalabs once a month, then radio silence until the next one. Over and over, for a year. That’s not a communication mishap. That’s a system that extracts energy from its most committed people and returns nothing. You can run a volunteer on belief for a long time. You cannot run them on belief forever while actively ghosting them in between.

Watch what the community did with the news, because it’s revealing. The gallows humor kicked in immediately - jokes about a “fud2earn” meta, a GameFi-Ponzi bit that landed because everyone got it instantly. And then, genuinely, an apology tweet: blame me, I was sub par, I’m sorry for the damage I did to the token price. Nobody actually believes one person tanked AVAX. That joke only works because half the replies have felt some version of that same guilt for staying this long. When your most loyal people start apologizing to each other for the price action, that’s not a morale problem. That’s a leadership vacuum.

Buried in the jokes was the line that actually matters: the “emploids” — community slang (I started it ;)), and it’s a good word - want everyone pivoted toward Avalabs equity instead of the AVAX token, because equity is the thing they’re already holding. Say what you want about the phrasing. That’s the entire equity debate compressed into one sentence, and it came from the community, not from the company.

And one more that stuck with me all week: the observation that it’s called an avalanche community proposal, but somewhere along the way it stopped having much to do with the community. Not clever. Just true, and everyone reading it already knew it was true.

Somewhere in the replies someone also joked that at $6 AVAX, a 51% attack on the primary network is basically affordable. That’s a joke about token price. It’s also, quietly, not just a joke.

I’m not eulogizing anybody, but burnout among community leaders isn’t a personality quirk - it’s an outcome. It’s what a system produces when a handful of unpaid people hold up sentiment for an entire chain while the institutions behind that chain pivot to enterprise and BUSINESS and go quiet. This week one of the strongest people we have hit his limit publicly. The rest of us are running on the same fumes. Somebody other than us has to start reinvesting in this, because we’re tapped out.

what’s actually growing (and why it doesn’t feel like it)

Let’s talk about the parts of this chain that are genuinely working, because they exist, and burying them under this week’s vibes isn’t fair to the people building.

An optimistic case made the rounds this week that’s worth engaging seriously: $13.7B in RWAs are now live on Avalanche L1s, with a credible line to another $14B on top of that. The framing was a four-step process - tech is done, adoption is happening right now, capitalization and payoff are just ahead.

I don’t disagree with the first two steps. I disagree that the third one is automatic. $13.7B in real assets sitting on this chain and AVAX is at 5-year lows. Adoption without value capture isn’t a phase you grow out of - it’s a gap, and it’s the actual gap nobody in this week’s entire debate managed to close. The casino already paid out. Step three’s still nowhere.

The same gap showed up in a different set of numbers this week: Avalanche’s distributed RWA value hit a new all-time high of $2.1B. AVAX’s total market cap is $2.86B. The assets sitting on top of this network are closing in on being worth more than the token that secures it.

Zoom out further and it gets stranger. The C-chain did roughly 80M monthly transactions, up 4x in a year. Around 70% of that is USDC moving around. Fees got cut 96% along the way, and the yield on those stablecoin transfers goes to Circle, not to Avalanche - Ava Labs earns a sliver of a cent per transaction on a chain doing more volume than it ever has. “The network is winning by every usage metric. The token is quietly subsidizing someone else’s business model.” - some aixbt quote

Same week, the FIFA World Cup partnership dropped - 100k+ people got ticket access on-chain, genuinely one of the biggest brand moments this ecosystem has landed all year. Payment happened on the C-chain. The NFTs live over on FIFACollect. No bridge, no ICTT connecting the two.

Many chains, acting like many chains, in the same week we were arguing about equity vehicles instead of interoperability. The whole founding thesis is one experience across many chains. The biggest announcement of the summer proved the opposite in real time.

Growth isn’t the problem. Growth is actually happening, faster than most people give it credit for. The problem is none of it is required to touch AVAX in order to happen, and nobody with the ability to change that has said a word about it publicly.

build games: a case study in how not to run incentives

I know its beating a dead horse, but I haven’t had a chance to comment publicly on it and I want to. Build Games was supposed to be proof that the chain was actually investing in builders - that someone saw us, and there was a real path for people building on this chain, and that we were genuinely excited to have something to do this summer.

First place took $100k, posted about “finessing the judges” with AI, and has shipped nothing in a month. Second place, who was it, i forg3t. And third place, the Grotto L1, is still shipping daily. Make it make sense.

Compare that to over a year ago $KET - 300+ community members who’d been showing up for months, homegrown, organic, no shortcuts. Then compare it to $WINK and $BLUB - mercenary KOLs, zero follow-through, gone the moment the incentive dried up.

This was never incentives vs. no incentives. It’s bad incentive design vs. good incentive design, and nobody at FDN has said a word about fixing the selection criteria that produced this outcome. In fact there has been no mention of any incentives going out again. What is being leaked out for a temperature check? Read on

the equity debate, actually explained

An Avalabs employee - several levels below c-suite, worth saying plainly - floated publicly this week whether Ava Labs needs its own equity vehicle instead of putting everything behind AVAX, the way AAVE chose to double down on its own token rather than spin up a separate wrapper.

The community’s collective response fit in one line: so we were focused on the equity all along?

My own first reaction was simple - focus on AVAX, make the token the thing that’s actually needed. The fact that anyone anywhere near labs is comfortable floating equity out loud in public is bearish on its own, regardless of intent.

The counter-argument - and it’s been made consistently for four years by an ex-AvaLabs emploid, so I’ll engage it seriously - goes like this: take a stock public that holds AVAX, give investors upside on the commercial side too, and bring new capital into the ecosystem. I pushed back on that directly. Current holders already absorbed the downside. We sat through the entire bear market, bought every narrative reset, and we’re still deep underwater. Being told the fix is to go buy a second ticker for upside we assumed the first one already covered isn’t alignment. It’s a new bag with extra steps.

The pitch adjusted from there - fold in the commercial side too, AvaCloud and the rest, so one vehicle captures both the token and the business. That’s a more sophisticated version of the same idea. It still doesn’t answer the question that actually matters: how does any of it get value back to AVAX, the token itself? Revenue flowing into an equity vehicle pays shareholders. It doesn’t pay token holders. We’d be tokenizing the world’s assets while the community that supplied the TVL, ran the validators, and stuck around through everything watches the upside from outside the fence - again.

AAVE didn’t build a side vehicle for any of this. They put the token at the center - buybacks, fee sharing, governance, all routed through one asset. That’s the model that already works, and it’s sitting right there for anyone to copy.

Put the value capture directly on AVAX - AvaCloud revenue, RWA yield, buybacks, whatever mechanism gets it done - and holders get the upside without needing to buy anything new. That’s the entire premise behind ACP-67 and the burn mechanism, and it’s been the point since before this week’s debate even started.

dat wont work, we already tried dat

The equity-wrapper idea isn’t new either. We’ve run this exact experiment twice already, in public, with real numbers attached.

AVAT, Avalanche Treasury Corp, went public to do precisely what’s being proposed now. The stock is down 93% in a month, and they filed a going-concern warning with the SEC.

AVX, AVAX One, same thesis, different wrapper. The CEO resigned last week under Nasdaq compliance pressure.

Avalabs and FDN have said nothing publicly about either one. Holding a token doesn’t create alignment by itself - the incentive structure has to actually deliver it, and a stock wrapper doesn’t fix that gap, it just relocates it. Tried twice, failed twice. Make AVAX the value layer directly and there’s nothing left that needs wrapping.

what actually needs to happen

A real fix for everything above is already sitting in a handful of proposals on the table right now.

ACP-273, 236, and 277 are good housekeeping - but 273 matters most near-term. Cut minimum stake duration from 2 weeks to 48 hours and ETF custodians can actually stake AVAX. That’s not housekeeping. That’s the only real near-term institutional catalyst this ecosystem has.

The burn mechanism - dynamic reward burning targeting 2% net inflation, an actively shrinking supply cap - is the EIP-1559 playbook, and it’s the real tokenomics story here, not equity.

ACP-67 - quote assets in USDC or USDT, yield recycled directly into AVAX buybacks and validator incentives, targeting $5B in stablecoin supply - is the mechanism that turns this week’s RWA and transaction growth into an AVAX story instead of a Circle story.

Stop funding mercenary capital with no follow-through. Reward the builders and the community members who never left. We stayed. Reward that. And when new people do come in, build something that keeps them here once the incentive period ends.

to the community..

I’m reading this week for what it actually was - not one person’s departure, but a warning about what this ecosystem does to the people who hold it up. Leaders don’t burn out because they stopped believing. They burn out because belief was the only fuel anyone ever gave them.

I’m down badly on this token against everything else I could have held instead. I’m not writing any of this from a position of comfort. But I’m still here, and the people who built this community alongside me are still here - some of them just building from a different spot for now.

This community isn’t the liability people keep treating it as. It’s the asset that keeps getting left off the balance sheet entirely.

Troops don’t stop waiting because the mission changed. They stop waiting when nobody shows up to lead it.

To FDN. Avalabs. The receipts are/were public, the proposals are already on the table, and the community told you exactly what it needs this week - in memes, in gallows humor, in one very honest apology tweet that nobody asked for.

Now show up. 🔺

— ExcelBaller

Avalore, Edition #48

Avalore is now for small businesses (me)

My first avalore, yeaaa.. I was thinking about going over community stuff.. the hot emin trials, the hot emin launch.. encrypted.. makooor.. bla bla bla.. all the community projects, and how Team1 is the only thing in tune with the community.. but today i got pissed at how [redacted] we are.

so let’s talk about where we are right now..

Welcome to 2026, if you are an avalanche community member still.. hope is not great. that being said, there’s hope.. deep in the fabric, you don’t really see it because it is not well communicated.

You may be asking why is it badly communicated? well, we lost a lot of people in the last layoffs, and gained ex solana people. One already left.. after a few months of time wasting, and community baiting..

And, the others.. well.. they are deeply understaffed now. And, hiring takes a long time to do.. because if you think about it.. nobody from web2 can comprehend what we do here everyday.

Now, let’s talk about our hope list.. avalanche is technology built for businesses.. the infra hub of institutions.. the hyundai whisperer.. our great tokenomics redo.. and, the obvious winner.. the infrastructure of the world cup! *everyone claps euphorically*

all this could be an amazing narratives if we’d be able to tell the story well enough.. but alas we are stuck in an infinite loop of solana stealing every narrative.. news accounts hand picking parts of our press releases that makes us look dumb.. yeaa 7minutes.. and, also because these same businesses choose to launch their LPs on solana, and their infra on avalanche..

we hold the TVL, help them with licenses, legal.. ect, and they hold the revenue from these retail pools while these same things are gatekept behind our great L1 technology on our side.

truly amazing business practices..

First L1 to explicitly choose network adoption over token value capture. The network is winning. the token is subsidizing circle’s business model.

let’s go more into solutions..

people love solutions.. we’re solution maxxinnnnnnnnnnnnnnng.

If i were to be a multi billion dollar company.. I would focus more on story telling, making sure the narrative is clear without being hated and hero making the emploids..

the question remains.. where are our heroes? tbh, most left a while back.. our most recent, Luigi.. (we wish him well) but now.. there’s just nobody.. emin isnt active, nobody is active.. everyone is enjoying summer. wuuuu

maybe wolfi could be our hero.. or even our giraffes.. or hot emin?

Let’s talk about how easy it was to see that momentum would be coming in june.. and how nobody at avalabs was preparing for it.. when i started spamming hot emin, it was to make people understand that we can have fun with literally no token.. and that the local or real bottom was close.. and like last cycle.. people would migrate onchain.. sadly, solana got their shit together first with pumpfun, and they made ansem the hero

Ansem went straight where we got told by the marketing team we couldn’t during last sept/oct/nov.. RETURN TO MEMES.. and, this is how solana won the summer

UNTIL the next great corporate chain came out, ROBINHOOD L2.. stealing the show at the perfect moment.. then they got everyone who bid Ansem, and the solana memes to mass exodus to their chain.

Tbh, incredible mercenary strategy.. It’s like wink, and blub right after ket. now, people are even wondering why solana..? when you have the robinhood chain.. truly remarkable.

How will this arc end? who knows.. back to solana, back to robinhood, back to idk monad???? maybe to avalanche???? (uncertain)

for now, on avax we focus on business making.. hope you heard about makooor? great business, great metrics.. Thank you Team1 for helping fund the credits of the community..

ok, now more solutions.. at this point, i dont really expect the tokenomics to be made with a strong narrative anymore.. like matias said.. he is focusing on slow compounding.. which means, most of the time that we’re gonna take a long time before bouncing back.. like every pump last cycle.. avax was the last to pump everytime

tbh, i understand matias.. it is lonely at the top. Building in silence is hard.

But, do not worry.. It’s time for me to make my third ACP (not that it really changes anything since abalaba have all the validators)

It will be named ACP-67.. trying to get the younger demographic in our ecosystem, because we’re averaging 50 yo right now

It will be my greatest ACP to date.. It’ll focus on transforming the Avalanche tokenomics and economics into something people wouldnt expect.. a technology made for businesses. HUGE!!!

anyways, my ACPs dont really get far emploids.. you do not have to worry.. but they are popular.. the people love them, they are provocative.. on a chain where there’s nothing happening most of the time.. this is at least something.

I do have qualifications in ACP making tho as you can see below

I don’t really wanna say more than this.. because this is a crucial moment for avalanche, and if they dont take Q3 seriously.. they will fumble Q4.. and like last cycle.. they will hype us up forever for the next quarter

Q1 will be huge, Q2 will be insane.. but Q4 will be the biggest.. Ive heard this too many times.. now, I’m just gonna do what i do best.. have fun, maximize my llm psychosis into making business projects/experiments, X impressions and the trials..

can you believe I will soon be paid by X to scream on the TL.. truly an amazing business this platform is now.. (except for all the bugs ofc)

but yea.. if you look at all the communities rn.. the other chains do seem appealing tbh.. im not gonna lie.. I do understand why the nochillios are rebelling right now..

we just dont have anyone to assemble the community.. and like ive learned through conquest documentaries on youtube.. ecosystems/nations dont last if tribes dont align.. and we’ve had a couple tribal warfare throughout the months.. mainly the c-chain communities vs the marketing dept..

and I wouldnt be surprised if we keep going down that path.. or ppl all just start fading the c-chain as nobody gives one fuck about the c-chain internally..

it’s like a neglected baby that will turn to hate when it doesnt understand why it was abandoned.

tbh, there is no solution.. good luck to all community members, and I love you.

RETURN TO C-CHAIN

Gbiz to all my fellow business enthusiasts! This is the first article after our big rebrand so hopefully you guys will like our completely new direction. To any readers we lose in the process, I’m sorry for making this tectonic shift but I think it will be worth it in the long run.

You’ll see our new and improved logo (the black is slightly darker) at the top, and the messaging should hopefully be more consistent now.

Welcome to Avalore: News Built for AVAX

Avalanche is Built for Business™

My call for emploids to tweet more was answered! Thank you, Arielle!

She hinted at a special announcement coming this week which got people all riled up. We turned our notis on, 🔔, sure that this would be something huge.

I’ll just let Justin take it from here:

So yes, once again we were hammered over the head with the fact that Avax is for business. I covered this a lot in my crashout article four months ago (!) but let’s do our quarterly “Avax is for Business” rant! Hooray!

I will offer some constructive criticism to the Labs team to help them understand the main two reasons why this “story” is not landing with the community:

Problem 1. We have no reason to care about businesses

The issue is not that Avalanche wants to target businesses. The issue is that 99% of the people reading their tweets or reading this article do not identify as businesses. We do not care about businesses being onboarded, and see no reason why we should.

For example, it’s cool that the World Cup runs on Avalanche technology! But that has NO impact on the token or our ecosystem at all! Nobody is buying a World Cup ticket and somehow getting onboarded to Hot Emin Twitter.

The campaign is not meaningfully involving the token or community in any way. I’m sure it’s great for BD KPIs though!

AvaLabs Action Item 1: Go deep in the tank and figure out why average people should care about businesses using the chain. Maybe it’s a tokenomics change (doubtful), maybe it’s releasing more details about the partnerships (FIFA burning $X in AVAX to use the technology), anything really.

If we see why AVAX onboarding businesses is good for us, we’d be happy to support it. We have yet to see a reason to believe this is the case though, and surely if there was something they could share on this front they would have already.

Labs/Foundation NEED to figure out this problem or sentiment will never improve.

Problem 2: One-dimensional Messaging

Guys, we understand that Avax is for business!! We are coming up on 6 months of banging our heads against this particular wall.

As I said earlier, if you want to focus on businesses that’s fine, but you’ve gotta throw us some bones too!

Even people from outside the ecosystem are seeing this messaging and being like “hang on a minute, what about everything else?”

And yes, the emploids were quick to jump on this post from Bill, telling him he’s just misunderstanding.

“AVAX is not ONLY for business, it’s for regular people too!”

And that is the issue. We understand you’re not saying AVAX is only for business. Despite what Bill said above, we understand you’re not literally saying “if you’re not a business, AVAX is not for you.”

However, AVAX is strongly failing the show-don’t-tell test right now.

Action Item 2: Stop telling us, and SHOW us that AVAX is not only for business now. As I said in my analysis of the AVAX twitter account 2 months ago (this has been going on for SO LONG), the twitter account is like 90% business, 10% community. To be fair it has gotten better since then, but it’s still incredibly lopsided.

The hackathons they run are giving first prize to businesses that we can’t even interact with, again showing us where their priorities are.

They tease a special announcement, which is just telling us yet again that AVAX is for business.

The team needs to get together and organize some stuff that SHOWS us that Avalanche is not only Built for Business™ but is also built for community too. Move some of this slop to LinkedIn and maybe focus the Twitter messaging more on, I don’t know, Avax Twitter?? Stop yapping and start doing.

Ok, that’s the end of my quarterly business rant! After a quick look at my calendar, it seems like we’ll be due for another one of these on September 18. Maybe Meridian and Forg3t will have jumpstarted the AVAX ecosystem by then.

Giraffe is Doing Things

Shoutout to Giraffe for giving us some actual fun content to write about this week!

Congrats to Dimi for taking down the pot in the inaugural Avax Bingo season with a predictably pessimistic bingo:

Overall it was a fun experiment, and it gave us some enjoyment on the timeline. Can’t ask for much more than that!

The rewards seem pretty stacked as well. My cards were horrible, and I just barely lost money on the season. Well, just barely lost AVAX anyway. Price went down so I imagine lots of people lost money. 1 AVAX = 1 AVAX!

Giraffe has also announced that he is nearing release on his NFT collection, with the presale happening this week as well. Big week for Giraffe! I’ve sent my money in because I just want to feel something again. Also he teased some potential plushies for holders which would be sweet.

I suppose I will forgive him completely trainwrecking my Bingo card:

That’s all for this week! Hope you enjoyed our quarterly business rant!

Now that bingo has come to it’s conclusion, I’m finally free to take a REAL break from Avalore. There was enough content this week thanks to some emploid tweets, but next time there’s a slow week I am OUTTA here.

Also shoutout Fudge for the ₹5000 grant! That keeps our servers online for another two months. It costs money to run this thing! Really makes you think.

Tweet of the Week

Happy World Cup to all who celebrate!

As a member of a split USA/England household I have been forced to learn about soccer this year. It’s been great to see both our teams doing well, although I still don’t understand why they won’t stop the clock between quarters.

Also I don’t understand why there is so much hype around this Ronaldo guy, he seems like the worst player on the team? Anyway, it looks like the USA has a good shot at winning this year despite soccer being a tier 2 sport here.

Ok, that’s enough Euro bait for now! There’s not a ton of news (as usual) but let’s do it.

YourGrails Continues to Roll

Our guest writer Smudge touched on YourGrails last week but it’s still one of the top stories of the chain as volume continues to climb.

As he would say, I am a “Poke-person” although I am not a card collector. Personally I don’t have a ton of interest in these types of platforms—they seem like NFT lotteries with extra steps and we know how those turned out. I am sidelined in this Pokemon meta! I hope you guys get rich.

Bias aside, the site undeniably works well and scratches an itch for many people. I tried it out and everything seemed to work smoothly, I even lost a battle or two.

In these dark times where people are just looking for buttons to click, we could do a lot worse than a lottery with Pokemon as prizes. Shoutout the team for delivering a great product!

From what I can tell the site has spent a lot of time sold out (sorry, NOT sold out, they just ran out of inventory for packs. But NOT sold out) so that has to mean that it’s doing really well.

Hotemin Trials??

Nobs has leaked some more info on what is coming down the Hot Emin pipeline and people are getting excited! I don’t know what the timeline on this is but we must remain patient, fellow market participants.

It sounds like Nobs has learned a lot from the previous presale meta and this won’t be as straightforward a process. It’s been a year and a half since KET launched, so it makes sense that it’s time for a new meta. A trials meta?

It looks like there will be multiple (three?) ways to get involved, and they’ll all require something different of us. Some trials will benefit people with large social followings, some trials will benefit those with skill, and some trials will be for the common man (or woman).

That’s all I’ve got for this week!

Not a ton going on in AVAX-land these days, I’m beginning to lose some momentum on these. I had a whole “MegaETH Postmortem” section reflecting on where I think that went wrong, but I cut it because it didn’t seem interesting enough.

Maybe we will do another Lore history article soon? Maybe some Labs employees can say some inflammatory shit this week? Most of our previous offenders are no longer with the company unfortunately.

I have one more week before AVAX Bingo is done, so that seems like a good time to break until things pick up again.

As VQ would say, “AVAX is at 5 fucking dollars and you’re still writing avalore??”

It’s a big week for World Cup though! Huge USA game today against Australia and then I’ll be going to the England vs Ghana game next week!

Here’s to hoping the lads can put together 4 solid quarters of soccer and not come away with a disgusting tie.

Tweet of the Week

Well, hello and welcome. This is not Smitty writing this today. This is not AI either, this is an underling, a minion, a pre-reader, an (unpaid) discord mod, yes folks, this is Smudge.

“Who the f**k is Smudge?” you cry. I am merely a cog in the wheel, here to keep the engine idling for one week whilst Smitty attends to other business and has a week off.

Take a deep breath … It’s in short supply, but let’s do the news …

Abbax x Pokemon

Never did I ever see myself reporting on anything Pokemon, but CG, Trading Aloha, and Polypup launched ‘YourGrails’ this week.

This is an app to where you can purchase provably random, certified Pokemon cards for $50 each.

Hands up, I am not a trading card guy and certainly not a Poke-person, I don’t wanna catch em all. So the prospect of handing over 50 bucks for a card seems pretty wild to me. However, there is clearly an appetite for this as they have already sold over 1000 ‘packs’ (single cards) as people gamble that they will reveal a card worth up to $24,500.

You can instantly redeem your drawn card for 90% of its value, which I think is a pretty good deal as you don’t have to handle the card or actually find someone willing to pay and make the sale.

There’s a battle mode which is also live, I’m not 100% certain of the mechanism, but it looks like you battle ‘Top Trumps’ style against an opponent and win or lose a bonus card. I’ll admit, I’ve played Top Trumps in my time and it is quite fun. Though I’ve never played one round for $500!

Editor’s note: No fking clue what “Top Trumps” is, sounds like some British bullshit, sorry guys.

Soon you will be able to have your physical card shipped to you, use the marketplace and even take out loans against your cards!? I mean, people will lend against $ARENA, so stranger things do happen.

One Hundred Dollars for $HOTEMIN

The Hot Emin Summer is still warming up. Smitty declares no actual involvement in this (I am not so sure about that) but Nobs and Excel continue to keep Hot Emins Lambo revving and it looks like a leak on a pre-sale.

$100? Unlucky to droves of ‘wen hotemin’ third worlders, there is a $100 stumbling block headed your way, please continue to tag Smitty in your replies, he is going to fund 3 random hot emin supporters. We love ya, we love ya, we love ya.

Editor’s note: This “We love ya, we love ya, we love ya” USA soccer chant is not real! I promise you I have never heard this in all my life.

Well, that’s been fun writing. Thanks for reading if you got this far.
Fear not, your Avax bingo square is still alive and Smitty will be back next week.

Tweet of the week

Editor’s note: THIS IS NOT REAL NOBODY CHANTS THIS AHHH!1!!!!11!!

We’re back! Another week in the books. I hope you guys are all surviving out there, I just checked the price of AVAX and it is NOT looking good bros.

Stay strong! Hopefully by now you are not super exposed financially. Unless you’re a business, then I assume you’re very exposed and doing well! Maybe working on a partnership? Consider going to Summit to conduct business with other businesses!

I don’t know many people that hold AVAX anymore. For the rest of us, our exposure is more mental in nature. We’ve been here so long that we want to see the chain do well, regardless of if we are currently holding.

Anyway, let’s do the news!

AVAX Account Tests Shitposting

It’s still only allowed to happen on the non-business days (weekends) for some reason, but the AVAX account continues its small foray into shitposting!

It’s now mostly just spamming things about AVAX Summit during the week, but at least we are making progress. I called this out last week but I will do so again in the hopes that we see more of it in the future!

Will we eventually see a post that has any relevance to us during the week? Is such a thing possible? Only time will tell!

Instead they’ve now moved the business-slop posting to the FDN account, tweeting out the same images that they used on the main account two months ago:

But hey, at least they changed the background color and the caption!

LABS AND FDN ARE TWO COMPLETELY SEPARATE ENTITIES!!!!111!!!!

I guess it’s better for us if the slop comes from the FDN account rather than main? I’m not sure, just thought it was interesting.

Kevin is Gone

It was a big week for frequent Avalore character, Kevin Ricoy, as he publicly announced he was suffering from PTSD and then shortly after followed it up with leaving Ava Labs. We call this the Killeen special.

Jokes aside, I feel bad and I hope they both are able to work through their problems. Therapy is great! Shoutout therapy! The negative stigma around going to therapy is so fucking stupid. If you need help, get it! You’re not a macho man because you ignore your problems! Real macho men confront and work on their issues! Ok end of rant, let’s continue.

I will miss Kevin! He provided a lot of good content for us over the years 4 months. He’s the only Head of Communications I know that had to frequently delete his own tweets. I can respect the lack of filter! He was also (sometimes) responsive to my DMs so I appreciate that.

Let’s remember some of his greatest hits:

This article is already struggling for content these days, so losing him will be a big blow. It may force me to write about [insert current Grotto grift here] more often which will make this experience worse for all of us.

Now all we really have is to make fun of Voh tweets. Speaking of which…

Why Would We Do That?

Don’t have much to say here, just thought this was a funny one. This is a tweet that Kevin would have been forced to delete! Free Kevin!!!

Yes indeed, why would you reward active, committed users with a cool prize from a business you’re partnered with??? Ha! What a truly outrageous idea.

Anyway, that’s all the news I’ve got for this week! Not gonna lie guys, I’m losing steam again. There’s just basically nothing happening while we wait for hot Emin to launch.

One thing I’m trying to figure out is if it’s worth it to fly out for Summit. Can you guys let me know in the comments if you’re going? Many of the people I went with last time are not attending this year, but I’m always open to meeting new community members!

Shoutout to my fellow “others”:

Tweet(s) of the Week Kevin

Ghotemin to all who celebrate! I will be frank with you guys, I’ve got a bit of writer’s block this week.

It feels like not a ton has happened other than Emin continuing to be sculpted like a Greek god. Should this be the first pictures-only post?

Ehhh it’s too late for that already! Maybe next time! Let’s do the news.

AVAX is for Community Too!

It seems like there must have been some kind of internal meetings with the marketing team this week as we are beginning to see some community-first messaging from various Ava Labs accounts.

Even the main account was allowed to tweet some fun slop!!! Maybe they are listening to us after all. The community stuff was mostly on the weekend I guess (weekdays are for business), but it’s a start!

Congrats to Labs for figuring out that it’s good to occasionally post things that the people reading the posts might actually like. Revolutionary.

Arielle even tweeted about Summit again to make sure we know that Summit is for the community! It’s not just for suits, it’s for builders as well.

It’s giving some “Let them eat cake” vibes but it’s still progress!

Also I want to say that the Summit conference itself will probably be great for whoever they decide their target market is. The Labs event team is one of the strongest arms of the company. Go Vanya go!!!11!!!

Emin is Still Hot

Maybe I haven’t seen much news because my timeline is just completely flooded with hot Emin memes. Please stop tagging Me/Nobs/Excel/Tac in low effort slop though! If they are good we will see them anyway! Tagging just makes me like you less (unless it’s REALLY funny, then it’s allowed).

Also, I don’t know anything about the project—it’s Nobs and Excel’s thing. I just like posting memes. Amplify!

Anyway, here are some highlights from this week of Hot Emin Summer:

There was lots of good video content as well, but obviously that doesn’t fit as nicely in this format! Overall nice work everyone, keep it up.

That’s all I’ve got for this week! Bit of a breezy one, but not all weeks are big ones! The community is too united behind hot Emin. That, combined with a clear push from Labs to stop tweeting only business slop, has led to less drama!

Is this the new AVAX? Can Hot Emin Summer really save us all? See you next week!

Tweet Algo of the Week

Gbusiness everyone! Hope you’ve had a good week and some strong deal flow.

I won’t bore you with much preamble this week—my messaging has been fragmented in the past and I’m trying to give more clarity on what Avalore really is: a space for AVAX community news.

Solana / Avax Comparisons

I’ve touched on this many times here but it keeps coming up again and again. The institutionalization of crypto is not just limited to AVAX (more on that later) but is also taking place on other chains.

Solana, once known for being THE place for consumer crypto, has been frustrating its users by moving away from them and trying to be more “serious.” Sound familiar?

I’ve blanked out the chain because this could easily be about AVAX FDN, but it’s not! This is Solana!

What Kate meant by calling Solana the AVAX of this cycle is that they both once had a thriving onchain economy, but AVAX, as we know, died down quite a bit since its golden days.

Solana is looking to do the same as all its metrics are down dramatically as well. AVAX community members began to commiserate with Solana users about this, and then our favorite Director of External Communications was quick to step in.

He hit us with the tried and true “Solana is jumping off a bridge, so we should too” defense. Which honestly, fair play to him! Solana nailed the onchain narrative, maybe they will nail this one too!

Either way, if the proverbial puck is actually falling off the bridge, skating towards it does nothing for us average crypto users. As I’ve said many times, this might even be the right decision for the companies, but we (CT) lose here either way.

I wish both AVAX and Solana the best of luck in their endeavors to capture institutions! Hopefully doing so will mean positive things for the token price and onchain communities!

Blaze Community is Angry

It seems the Blaze community is up in arms over some kind of Blaze Prime program that was launched a few weeks ago. I won’t speak too much on this since honestly I have no idea what’s going on over there, but multiple people have told me that it was run poorly.

It sounds like they are massively diluting the ecosystem in the hopes of encouraging new people to join. Shocking!

I feel bad for people that are heavily invested, but this is the point of having a token guys! I thought we learned this with Salvor already—when a token is used exclusively as incentives for using the platform, it will go down over time. See: $ART, $BLAZE, $BLACK, $JOE, etc etc etc.

Don’t hold high emission tokens!

Meanwhile their monthly 50k expense transfer was up to 80k this month. Maybe they are using the extra money to buy back the token? I don’t have the energy to trace this, but maybe someone else does. Also please note that this is an incredibly expensive business to run—streaming infrastructure ain’t cheap!

All this to say, things are not looking great in Blaze world. They raised a ton of money, and the product undeniably works, but has yet to find the kind of adoption that could make the token worth holding. Hopefully that changes in the future! I streamed on Blaze last week—it was fun!

Cave Launch

Couple more tummy aches then up only!

In the latest Grotto scam, Snaps has finally launched the $CAVE token. For those who are unaware, $CAVE is the token of the only premier DEX on The Grotto blockchain. Yes I can make the same joke again, it’s still funny!

As of writing, it appears the token is slightly below presale price, which is not too bad. Now all we need are some tokens to trade on the chain so we can stake for DEX revenue!

Don’t worry, I’m sure our favorite grifter has something just for the occasion:

We buy Bob nfts, so we can buy more $CAVE, so we can stake it to get trading fees from when we buy the $BOB erc20 token. The Grotto flywheel!

Congrats to those who sold their presale for profit, and congrats to the rest of us that are long term Grotto community members.

AVAX is for Business

Arielle, SVP for AVAX growth (former Solana head of comms), finally gave us some clarity on AVAX’s future this week.

I know we were all confused by the messaging coming from the main socials—it was impossible to figure out exactly what AVAX’s narrative was.

Maybe AVAX is trying to target corporations? Or institutions? Or maybe the target market is actually companies? No, perhaps the AVAX narrative centers around enterprises?

It was hard to tell! But finally we have some clarity:

AVAX is for business!!!!1!!!

Well, I’m glad that’s sorted.

Her comments about Summit are a bit discouraging as well. I’ve been on the fence about going as I was worried it would just be a bunch of people in suits (and Wrathtank) shouting “business” at each other over and over again, and this kind of confirms that.

The only redeemable quality of these things is the side events, so to call those out specifically and say the focus should be on people “doing business together” is sort of signaling that people like me shouldn’t be there. I’m not trying to do business with anyone!

Maybe we can hold our own community Summit instead? A golf trip or something? We can even do it on the weekend!

Hot Emin Summer Continues

Let’s end on a positive note this week. The Hot Emin Summer Twitter account was created!

In just 3 days, the account managed to ratio the main AVAX account with a quote tweet! Pretty impressive. Surely this would qualify whoever is running it for a position at AvaLabs marketing.

Wow! Amazing!

Can Nobs save us yet again?

Tune in next week to find out!

Tweet of the Week

Week 40! Wow! If you’re reading this right now, I bet you didn’t think we’d make it to 40 Avalore articles. I certainly didn’t think so! It’s been a bit dicey these last few months.

Thankfully Nobs has saved the chain again! You know what we’re talking about this week, so let’s just get into it.

Hot Emin Summer Origin

Yes, we will of course get to more pictures of hot Emin later, but if you want to understand the movement you must first understand how it began.

It all started with a seemingly innocent post from Nobs, pictured above.

HOWEVER, our glorious leader Emin did not think that post was so innocent at all! In fact, after seeing the post at 2am on May 12, 2026 (the Hot Emin Summer Solstice), Emin took major offense to his own objectification.

In a fit of rage, Emin blocked Nobs on Twitter and removed him from group chats. He could no longer stand to interact with such a superficial individual.

This escalated the situation, and Nobs retaliated the only way he knows how—flooding the timeline with images of hot Emin.

And thus, the legend of $HOTEMIN was born!

Community Buyin

With the ticker announced and the gauntlet thrown down, the AVAX community did what it does best—rallied around memes.

Emin’s chest was EVERYWHERE. There was no escaping him or his massive biceps. It was impossible to scroll Twitter without a half naked Emin popping up in every post.

I think this is a good example of why people hate to see focus shift away from the community on AVAX. They just don’t make communities like this anymore. This type of viral explosion does not happen in such a coordinated manner on other chains—it really is something special we have here.

Labs Buyin

What’s this??? Labs supporting a community initiative??? Wow!!! Whoever runs Emin’s account managed to change his PFP to the original Hot Emin image for a few hours (I assume he changed it back when he woke up). Progress!

We even had the C-Suite posting about it! Really nice to see everyone aligned and having a good time. This is the kind of thing the chain has been missing.

The emploids were quick to champion this as a huge win for the chain. This is proof that a chain can be for both business AND community!

HotEmin IS business! This has been their plan all along! Despite the heavy institutional narrative coming from the main Twitter account, the AVAX community has been allowed to blossom in the environment that Labs has created for us.

Speaking of the main Twitter account…

The Nose Strip is Pulled Off

We got some late breaking news this week! Avery has stepped down from Ava Labs! You may know him as the one previously running the AVAX Twitter account.

I will admit, I used to not be a big Avery fan. I found the institutional content he was pushing to be very uninspiring and blamed him for that. After talking with him one-on-one though, I really think he’s a smart guy and a lot of the blame I placed on him should have been placed on those above him.

You might remember that study of the AVAX main account I posted a few weeks back where I found the account to be much less relevant to us than other chains’ main accounts.

HOWEVER, I’m guessing that was published right around the time that Avery left, and the account has gotten much, much worse since then.

I believe Avery was one of the good guys, and it’s sad to see him go. We can only hope that the daily 9am “Avax is for business” posts are a sign of a time in transition, and that we will eventually get more relevant content moving forward.

That’s all the news I’ve got for this week! Time to photoshop more pictures of Hot Emin. Will the token actually launch?? Only time will tell.

Tweet of the Week

(WATCH THE VIDEO HERE)

We’re back! Another busy IRL week for me as we’re trying to setup a move to a new apartment, so apologies in advance if I miss some news this week. Give a man a break every once in a while!

Honestly I’ve still been spending most of my time on MegaETH lately. There are a few new ponzis there that the GC seems to be making money on (something about laundering money?) but I really haven’t had time for much.

If you like card games (Hearthstone, MTG, Balatro, etc) I highly recommend this game Showdown (ref code 6129, shameless plug). It’s like 1v1 poker but with action cards that effect the board—you can also wager USD on every match. VQ and I will be sponsoring a $500 tournament in the next few weeks, so look out for that. Hooray for web3 games that are fun!

Anyway, you’re not here for that. You’re here for AVAX community news! You sure as hell can’t get that from the AVAX twitter account—I had to mute it this week as I was getting too triggered by the twice daily posts about how Avalanche is built for business (I’m not a business)—so I shall try and deliver some news.

Salmon Swimming Upstream

Build Games Bear’s Den grant recipient, River Run Game, had their mint this week! I was actually on a road trip and missed the ENTIRE mint because the whole thing sold out!

This is very exciting news for AVAX as it’s been a while since we’ve had anything at all sellout. 500 pieces at 5a each is not too bad—a solid $25k raise for the team. Nothing like the bull market, but that’s a decent chunk.

Coupled with a Team1 mini-grant (dual funding???) it’s nice to see incentives for building community projects. Shoutout Team1 for yet again being the community’s glimmer of hope in this increasingly corporate world.

I don’t know when the game is actually supposed to start—remember, it’s going to be similar to Crabada—but hopefully if this can do well it will spark a new age of ponzis/experimentation on AVAX.

Will HashCash and River Run bring back our glory days? Who knows!

Japan Tokenizing Bonds on AVAX??

An announcement came out that the Japanese government would be tokenizing their bonds on the blockchain, and of course every Avalabs employee was quick to retweet about how it would be happening on AVAX.

The usual brigade of people shouting “why don’t the accounts ever mention AVAX specifically” began to raise their pitchforks, with seemingly good reason. Why not announce that this is happening on AVAX?? That should be big news, right??

Well, as some people who actually read the announcement were quick to point out—this is not actually happening yet. Basically, the announcement was actually about forming a research group to discuss the possibility of tokenizing government bonds on blockchain.

AVAX is one of three blockchain representatives on the joint committee. I don’t really know what Canton is but they seem to always be doing the same things we’re doing.

So yeah, I guess we should be tempering our expectations a little here. Sure this is kind of cool, and Progmat is already working with AVAX so it might even be likely to happen, but it’s a far cry away from actually announcing that the bonds will be live on AVAX. The group’s goal is to have a working prototype in 2026, so maybe that announcement will be more bullish and talk about AVAX specifically!

Even if this was a real announcement, GrottoJ has a good point here. Sorry I quoted him twice! His were just the tweets I saw!

It’s hard to get the community riled up for these announcements when they seem to be mostly nothingburgers and people feel neglected in other ways. I’m not gonna go into why that is for the 9000th time, but I will end with this tweet from Blue here for absolutely no reason:

There’s Money in the Cave

The latest Snaps presale just finished its raise! And wow, it’s kind of a big number!

I don’t remember what his Early or Chatnet tokens raised but I don’t think it was this much. The only premier DEX on Gr*tto chain commands a high valuation! Imagine how much the next Snaps presale will raise!

I don’t think the token will launch for a while as he irons out exactly how it will go down, but I’m really curious to see how this one ends up. Will this be the community token that finally gets crimed back up a bit? Will it be another presale dumpfest?

I don’t know what will happen, but thanks to the team at The Gr**to for giving us things to gamble on again. Talk about a gross chain product!

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for this week. Bit of a slow one and I’ve been a bit AFK a bunch lately. Soon we should have more info on Cave and River Run though so we have that to look forward to!

I cut a long section about the Foundation GCP stuff because my alpha readers told me it was boring—maybe I will save that for a Sunday tweet that nobody reads.

See you next week!

Tweet(s) of the Week