Avalore Dump Week 48

"Excelballore" Edition

Exceleminem, by @memofrogwell

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