We’re back! It’s been a pretty slow few weeks on the community drama side, and honestly that seems to be continuing as we move into the holidays.
But we can’t miss 3 weeks in a row! That would be madness!
Plus this has been a Big Week for news from our benevolent overlords so let’s discuss some business.
NYSE Platform to use AVAX
Yes!!!! The big news of the week, and the main reason why the price had a nice little bump (and is now showing relative strength in light of the whole market nuking).
This is BIG news. I know we often make fun of various institutional announcements, but this isn’t some 7 minute Hyundai test transaction from Mexico--this is the New York Fking Stock Exchange announcing that their new 24/7 trading platform will be using an AVAX L1 as a ledger!
As my dad told me when I explained the news to him: “I literally can’t imagine a more bullish announcement. Price must be up a ton!”
Well, not a ton, but it is helping! Baby steps, dad!
In an abstract sense, it’s obviously cool that such a huge step for the blockchain space is happening on our red chain, but of course there has been pushback from AVAX haters (there are a lot of those).
The most common thing I’ve seen is that this is a “nothingburger” and that Avalanche surely just paid for some exposure.
I’ve felt this way about announcements in the past, but the reason I think this is different is because we’re really seeing the “AVAX” portion of the deal be front and center.
I mean, look at this headline from the Wall Street Journal (!):
In the past, this would have read something like “NYSE Announces Tokenized Securities Platform” and then you’d have every Labs employee commenting “On Avax 🔺” underneath the tweet.
This time the “Avalanche” of it all is right there, leading the article.
There’s also an element of reciprocity that just has not been there in the past.
I remember when AVAX announced the deal to house World Cup tickets on their own L1. That should be huge, right? Maybe not quite NYSE huge but it is still a massive deal.
HOWEVER, I remember reading a bunch of articles about it and there was never any comment from the FIFA side.
The articles were full of quotes from our boy Dom about how this was going to fight scalping and revolutionize the ticketing world.
There were also quotes from Labs brass about how much volume and transactions the chain was doing, but there was rarely a comment from the FIFA side. I don’t remember seeing anything from them about how great the partnership was, or what problems it was solving for them. The messaging was always from the Labs side about how much they were helping FIFA.
That is NOT the case this time, with NYSE posting follow up tweets, interviews, and all kinds of media about specifically why Avalanche is the solution that they want.
For me, that’s why this partnership hits differently than others in the past.
But of course, paying for exposure is not the only complaint people had about the deal.
The other comment I see a lot is “what does this actually mean for $AVAX?”
This is fair! As Excel would say, “How does this accrue value to the token??”
Honestly, I don’t have an answer for you here as the specifics of the deal have not been released.
What I can tell you, though, is that everyone at Avalanche is circling the wagons and trying to shift towards prioritizing $AVAX specifically. I think in the past few years there has been a grow-at-any-cost policy in the company that has lead to exposure and “🔺doption” taking center stage, often at the expense of the token in the most literal sense.
We are right to criticize this!
But after having weekly meetings with Nahas, it is clear that this line of thinking is gone. It’s time to get back to our roots and start making sure that all deals benefit the token in some way.
I don’t have any special alpha to share for why this deal will make price go up, but I have confidence that the team is making $AVAX a priority so I am willing to wait and see how this will bring value to us as simple holders of the token.
Speaking of bringing value to the token…
FDN Announces Research Finalists
Another big part of my optimism comes from having meetings with Matias and the guys at the Foundation.
Before working with them, I kind of viewed the Foundation as a black box that pumps our coins (sometimes).
After speaking with them more, I feel much more confident that they are aligned in trying to make $AVAX the best it can be. Every conversation I have with Matias is about how he’s focused on increasing Avalanche’s revenue and then capturing that revenue and directing it to the token.
As I said before, the days of focusing only on adoption are long behind us. Avalanche is in the business of revenue now.
I mean look at the proposals that were selected!
Value Accrual
Token Valuation
Value Accrual (again)
Opportunity Costs
Yes maybe I have rose-tinted glasses now that I’m a contractoid, but I can only go off of my interactions with Matias and Nahas.
From the outside looking in, I understand that not a ton has changed. I understand the frustrations that many people have and I have them too.
But after talking with these guys almost every week, I really believe that the vibes are shifting towards all the things we want. Value accrual to $AVAX, partnerships that bring actual revenue and aren’t just for show, everything!
Something Matias said months ago really stuck with me: “We’re trying to solve a problem that has never been solved.”
There is not a single L1 out there that has figured out how to best accrue value to their token. Vitalik just recently released that he wants ETH to focus more on being a “store of value” than simply a fee-burning token:
ETH, AVAX, SOL, these are all basically just fee-burning tokens right now. Nobody has cracked how to best accrue value to their network.
ETH did well simply because of the creation of the EVM, SOL did well because they managed to capture the attention of normies, but in reality neither they nor anyone else has figured out how to really design a system that brings value to the token outside of burning fees.
The fact that the Avalanche FDN has acknowledged this and is working hard to blaze a trail forward can only be bullish for us. They are becoming the “research” branch of the Avalanche tree, and I’m hopeful they can make some changes that help token price go up.
I’ll let Nobs sum it up:
Bagdaddi Strikes Again
Ok that’s enough optimistic fluff! We do have some small community quick-hitter stories this week so let’s just breeze through.
With Moonbags ramping up his Juicy-related posts again, our resident robot investigator decided to take a look at the chart to see what was going on.
Tac quickly found some interesting transactions, namely a wallet that had bought Juicy a while ago and sold into some of the increased hype with the founder posting about it.
What’s that? The wallet sent the trading profits from dumping on the announcements back to Moonbags?
Fascinating!
I haven’t verified this and don’t really care to as I trust Tac’s investigation, but it is definitely funny. No further comment!
Hen Rugger Exposed
Another story which I have little desire to fact-check, but apparently the person behind the Hens project rug has been outted!
I briefly skimmed the article (it was 2000 words long and had a 68 item appendix, Chikn people are insane) but apparently someone named Zebra was found to be behind the project.
I have never heard of this person before, but if you are a Chikn enthusiast (do they read this article?) perhaps you know who that is. Shame on you for investing in an opportunistic fork on a new chain with anonymous devs though. You should know better!
Anyway, congrats on the $90k Zebra as I’m sure there will be no reprocussions for this. Not a bad haul tbh. Please contact me if you’re interested in forking something else from the Chikn ecosystem, I wouldn’t mind a slice of that pie.
And that’s all the news I’ve got for this week!
Yes I know it was a bit corporate, but honestly there hasn’t been much onchain news lately. It’s not just an AVAX thing, it seems everywhere is cooling down for the moment so that’s all we have to talk about really.
Props to the Avalanche comms team for hyping and delivering on the Big Week—this was much more exciting than changing the color red in the logo (long live the old pinkish-red). We have some real momentum now and I’m excited to see how it continues. If CEOs stop having affairs with Chinese spies maybe we can finally see some solid price action going into next year. Put the pump on the coin!
Tweet Discord Message of the Week
