Avalore Dump Week 35
"Same feather, flocking together" Edition
Hello my fellow birds! Hope you’ve had a great week of flocking together.
I will be blunt with you guys, I’ve been losing some motivation over the last few weeks here. It’s becoming harder and harder to work up the energy to write these articles as AVAX focus continues to shift away from the things I like.
It’s a shame, because I think behind ETH and SOL, AVAX probably has the next strongest community. It would be cool to see it given the tools to really thrive like it has in the past.
But alas! Giraffe added a Bingo square for me not missing a week of these things, so the show must go on. At least until the end of the quarter! Let’s do the news.
Dom Posts Very Avalabs Tweets
I know this will probably be controversial, but I like Dom! Yes, he got Deep Water Studios some grants back in the day, so I am incredibly biased, but that’s life!
He onboarded some absolute STINKERS, but at least he got some money in the community’s hands and was in the trenches. Back in his time, there was real money being spent on the ecosystem. Now we have…well, we don’t have much.
Anyway, I do NOT like some tweets of his this week, and they perfectly encapsulate the direction Ava Labs is going and why I’m losing motivation so I will include them here.
The above tweet is basically highlighting Labs’ continued focus on KPImaxxing at the expense of funmaxxing. Good! I hate “cool” and “neat” things too! Much prefer sustainable businesses hitting high transaction and user counts!
Then he went on to talk about how the Foundation is basically a VC and is trying to fund apps that will provide returns. This also is a common theme and something we’ve seen play out with Build Games.
It’s just frustrating to keep reading stuff like this. The Foundation’s job should be to try to convince people to come spend time on AVAX, and things that do this will not always be profitable and backed up by a bullet-proof business model.
Some random ponzi could drive much more activity to the chain than a well-thought out RWA business that people don’t want, despite having basically no business plan.
AHHHH I feel like I’m writing the same thing every week! Let’s pause for some positivity, I need a break.
Build Games Postmortem Postmortem
In an attempt to cheer myself (and maybe you?) up, I wanted to highlight some community projects that announced Build Games grants after I finished my last article.
I know the article was pretty negative, and it’s hard to mask my emotions when writing. Yes, of course I was salty that none of the three projects I was helping with got funding. But I don’t want to let that cloud my judgement, so here I’d like to give flowers to some projects that DID get funding that I actually use! Hooray for funding real projects!
I will skip The Grotto because everyone knows that one already and Wrath was on the cover last week so he’s gotten enough screentime.
We Keep Winning
We Keep Winning is a sports betting vault project from Average Andy. Basically, all you have to do is deposit USDC and let his trading algorithms do the work for you. Normally I’m incredibly skeptical of trading bots, but he has been grinding on this for a long time and has been working to find the inefficiencies in the sports betting market.
This is much different than algorithmically trading tradfi/large cap markets as there really are inefficiencies to capture here. So far his vault has given me ~10% return over the last month! Very solid!
Obviously profit is not guaranteed and you should be careful with what you risk, but win or lose it is fun to check what bets the bot is making and have something to root for while watching. Nice work, Andy!
AVAX Bingo
Avax Bingo from Giraffe is currently holding the position of “only thing to do on AVAX” right now. And for good reason!
It’s been really fun to watch the timeline as new squares come into play. Will Snaps be kicked from The Grotto team after posting some anti-Christian tweets on Easter? Will Vanya continue posting selfies at record pace?
It was cool to see everyone commenting “BINGO” when we got inversebrah’d this week, and we even ticked off the “partner with a Fortune 500 company” square! Yay for business!
It’s one of the few fun things we’ve had in a while, so thanks to Giraffe and Polypup for the good execution here.
Kardpay
Bit of a wildcard here, but I saw the Kardpay team got funding as well!
I don’t have a ton to say on this one as I haven’t used the project much, but I did test it and was able to easily get a virtual card, load it with AVAX, and use it to pay for things. A real working product!
The customer support has been great and they’ve answered my DMs promptly, as well as taken on some feedback. Seems like a solid team and a usable product. If you’re in the market for a crypto card, they’ve got you covered.
AVAX Ecosystem Call
Just going to cover this as some of you might have wondered what this call was about. Have no fear! I sat through the whole thing so you don’t have to!
If you’re reading this article and someone asked you to describe what’s going on in the AVAX ecosystem, how would you respond?
You might talk about how people mostly trade tokens on Pharaoh and NFTs on Salvor. You’d mention the recent AVAX Bingo mint and how people are talking about that. You’d highlight some Build Games projects that you use. Maybe you’d even mention that you get your news from Avalore! Shameless plug!
The call was not about any of that, unfortunately. It really just highlighted the differences between what we consider the “ecosystem” and how Ava Labs views it.
At the end of the day, this institutional ecosystem is the one that Labs is focusing on capturing. That is fair—I do think AVAX is positioned well for this. But that’s not our ecosystem, and I’m not really sure what it means for people like us. So far it hasn’t meant much.
The ecosystem call mostly focused on efforts to bring various TradFi concepts and loyalty programs to AVAX, so it really had no relevance to us. It felt like listening to a shareholders meeting for a B2B company, which I guess is what it was.
It wasn’t until 59 minutes had passed (it was an hour long call) that someone asked about how all this stuff will benefit the chain.
The Labs emploid who was speaking at the time (Nahas? Can’t remember) talked about how if we bring enough businesses here, eventually crypto native builders will want to be here too and it will spark lots of new development. They mentioned that these new founders would become the AVAX “KOLs” of the future.
So I guess the thought is that if we onboard enough sports teams loyalty programs and tokenized credit applications, crypto natives will be excited to build here and share the good word of the AVAX gospel? Maybe.
Surface Level Takes
Not much to say on this one! I guess we’ll just stay hyped for the things that are being built in the background that have yet to be priced in. The market is wrong!
Also Stupifff is not really understanding what an “ecosystem participant” is, as we talked about above. Do you think the Cavs care about AVAX price? Their loyalty program works the same with AVAX at $2 vs $9. Can Meridian still tokenize institutional credit with $3 AVAX? Probably!
Osmo brought up the age old $30M to Coinbase meme again this week, highlighting the price action. We will probably never get transparency into operational expenses, and maybe that’s too much to ask for, but it’s just another thing to add on to the pile.
Yes, these are definitely not all sells, but some of them are. It’s a stark contrast from EthereumFDN, which just this week announced sells of their own. Obviously there are downsides to announcing you’re going to sell vs just hiding it, but at this point Labs/FDN (SEPERATE ENTITIES) have used up most of their good will, and people just assume all transfers are sells. Transparency can’t be worse than that, right? Maybe some kind of retrospective?
That’s all for this week! It’s a bit grim I’m not gonna lie to you, but I’m trying to reflect emotions I’m feeling and seeing on the timeline as well. Maybe I’m overreacting? Do you guys feel this way too?
Personally I’m trying to take a step back from the AVAX “ecosystem.” I’ve muted some chats for a bit and retreated to the comfort of my usual Discords. Let’s sign off with this great tweet from a past AVAX legend:
I most definitely have been an AVAX community member for the last 4 years, but I’m trying to force myself to be more multichain. It’s easy to stick with what you know (the flock), but crypto is so small right now that it’s crazy to put all your eggs in one basket—especially when you are not that basket’s target audience anymore.
Solana recently released a developer bootcamp video, so that’s something I’m going to look into this week as I’ve always been too scared to veer away from EVM. MegaETH will be ramping into some kind of incentives program soon. Even though that chain seems pretty dead right now, that could be worth investigating as well.
I realize there’s a ton of “grass is greener” syndrome here, and most chains are having similar issues, but I think it’s worth giving other places a try.
Would you guys try a different chain if AVAX people started building there? Let me know in the comments!
Tweet of the Week
