Avalore Dump Week 31

"Support Bob's Petroleum" Edition

Bobs, by @memofrogwell

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

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

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

Let’s do some news!

Wrath Grift Launches On Time

Trigger Warning: Gro**o content

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

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

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

Avalabs Supporting However They Can!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Grant Stuff!

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

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

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

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

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

Fun stuff!

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

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

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

Obligatory News for the Suits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tweet of the Week