Avalore Dump Week 36
"Man in the mirror" Edition
Back again! It’s been a stressful week in Smittyland as we tried (and eventually succeeded) to acquire car insurance in the US for someone with an international drivers license. Shout out Geico for being the only company to get it done. If anyone reading this works for Geico, let them know I’m open to a sponsorship. Gotta get the bag somehow!
We’ve had some juice on the timeline this week—most of it more of the same. Community continues to be the problem! Let’s do the news.
Bear Markets Reveal All
What a tweet from Avery, AVAX’s chief emploid. I want to start off by saying that maybe there is a world where this was an innocent fluff tweet about building through the bear. That’s something many people will post about, and is not necessarily targeted or negative.
HOWEVER
Tweeting this after you’ve just finished an incentives program that people are unhappy with, at a time when the community is slowly but surely losing hope, is pretty horrible taste and will obviously lead people to take offense.
Oh, there’s also the fact that after receiving backlash he just doubled down on it:
I can’t really write about this stuff anymore guys, it’s too draining. Pretty much the entire community raged back against tweet, and for good reason. I don’t have a meaningful perspective to add here—it’s just another coin in the “community is the problem” piggy bank.
I feel bad if it wasn’t intended this way, but also maybe think about what you’re posting and don’t double down on it when it seems like it was misinterpreted??
Sometimes it feels like they are intentionally trying to cycle the community away so they can get a new one. Or none at all? I don’t really understand what the endgame is here.
Any other week this would probably be a massive section about why people received this poorly and what it could mean about what’s happening behind the scenes, but I don’t have the energy! Same story different week! We move on.
Return of the King??
Is it time for Nobs and Excel to bring back PointsMarket? Despite Grok mentioning me as part of the team, I don’t really have any insider information for you here.
The PointsMarket era was one of the most active AVAX CT has ever had, and most people remember it fondly. At this point it has taken on an almost mythical glow in people’s memories, and bringing it back would be no easy task.
The current issue with building things on AVAX is that there is just very little reward. The community is so small and hesitant right now, so the upside is extremely capped. Especially for something like PointsMarket, which was never monetized to begin with.
If we use Giraffe’s Avax Bingo as an example, he put a ton of time into that project but the team only made 180 AVAX, which at current prices would be around $1700. This is a high quality project that the entire community was excited for, and even with a 20% rake he was not able to take home more than $2k to split between him and the dev.
It’s tough to commit to building something like PointsMarket in this environment. We can take Chris and XRPant’s project HashCash as an example here too. It swept the timeline and had everyone involved. Even after all their hard work, with everyone participating, the coin peaked around $300k MCap and they will be responsible for it FOREVER.
They are more noble than most, doing it “for the love of the game,” but it’s not reasonable to expect people to take such lopsided risk/reward. Will Nobs and Excel slave over this for basically no reward just for the sake of vibes? We shall see.
I think this is the core of why people were unhappy with the results of Build Games. It seemed like it could have been a program to spark lots of cool projects on chain (ponzis even!), beefing up the “reward” side of building and giving people more freedom to experiment.
There was a point in the process where I was drinking the Kool Aid and thought that when it was over we would even have TOO MUCH to do on chain! 10 ponzis releasing on the same day! Ha!
As it stands, I think the only cool new thing we got out of it was Avax Bingo, and even that had already been helped into profitability by Bears and Salmon’s hackathon.
The rest of the projects that received funding either already existed, or aren’t relevant to most of us. I don’t want to disparage funding good projects that already exist, I just think it was a big missed opportunity on that front.
Shoutout Avax Team1 again here as for the past 6 months the only reward for building anything has been a $5k micro grant from Chimba. It’s a great program, but there’s only so much good will you can build with that.
What is an Ecosystem?
As I’ve said before, I don’t have a ton of energy left for this stuff, but I wanted to briefly follow up on last week’s article as some Labs emploids responded to my section about the ecosystem call being mostly corposlop.
They had various different messages but were all to the tune of this was BD talking to the broader ecosystem or this was explicitly not a community call.
I actually started to think that maybe I was wrong to assume an "Ecosystem Update” would have any relevance to me or the community. Am I the crazy one here??
No! I’m not! This is what a “Head of Ecosystem” does on other chains. Can you picture having an ecosystem call on AVAX where they were discussing how to reward communities in 2026? Hard to imagine.
Can you picture a founder who is in the trenches, responding and posting about memes with the community? Hard to imagine. (To be fair, Emin did this with $JUNIOR and it was awful. Not everything is black and white!)
The fact that I need to waste time trying to define what I mean by “community” and “ecosystem” is a great microcosm of the problems we have today.
I know you’re tired (I am too!) so you don’t have to read that whole post, but suffice it to say this is the 9000th time a Labs employee has asked us to explain “fun” or made some kind of reductive argument about how the community only wants them to buy our bags.
I don’t really blame them though, they exist in a different world than we do so it’s hard to converse on equal footing. They are in the BD trenches, not the onchain trenches, and that’s the lens they view the ecosystem through.
He’s right, the article would be boring without the “constant dramatics.” There would be nothing to write about! I’d just be writing about MyPrize’s new transaction counts every week! Awesome!
It’s even gotten to the point where people from other chains have reached out to me to try to open lines of communication as they see what’s happening here! I’m trying to focus on not being a maxi for one specific chain.
There’s often a gaslighting sentiment that gets pushed along the lines of “AVAX community is always fighting, it’s a bad look for the outsiders.” It was nice to receive some messages from outside our ecosystem from people explaining that they hear what the AVAX community is saying and think it can be better elsewhere.
It’s weird to feel negative even as price is going up—looks like we may even hit a $10 Bingo square today—but this is proof that community sentiment is not about price.
It has never been about price! It’s about feeling supported!! No, I will not explain what that means!!! That’s your job!!!! You can figure it out, I believe in you!!!1!!!!!
Sorry to Bingo enjoyers as I may need a break from Avalore next week. Getting too tilted writing the same stuff a million different times. Article quality is suffering, and I’ve been really busy IRL anyway. Maybe it’s better to let things blow over and come back when (if) morale improves.
Tweet of the Week
