Avalore Dump Week 16
"Wrote this instead of my vows" Edition
Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate! This will be my final Avalore as a single man, so that’s exciting as well! All kinds of things are happening, but the show must go on. The lore MUST be chronicled. It will just be rushed and un-edited this week. Hooray!
You Don’t Want Funny
I think this post from Avery was mostly well-intentioned, but it makes a good section header for what I want to talk about! The AVAX account recently posted a banger of a video about handling crypto at Thanksgiving dinner, along with reposting a VERY popular weekly newsletter:
Avery is one of the people who runs the account, so it stands to reason that he is at least a little ok with funny. What I really wanted to talk about here is an emerging narrative that Avalanche Foundation made a mistake or wasted money bidding meme coins.
This is such an insane stance to me, as I think it was probably the best thing they’ve ever done. The FDN’s main job is to support the ecosystem, and for a while the only thing that users of AVAX were doing was buying new memecoins. The success of KET brought many new eyes onto the chain and far from “loosing everyone money” it generated a ton of wealth for people here. Even outside of the presale, people hit a 100x just buying after launch.
After the presale tokens, the FDN continued bidding memes that were launched on Arena. I think some of the tokens they chose to support were questionable (including Jesus’ $SUPRA token—clearly he’s appreciative!) but the majority of the chain was trading these tokens, so putting money into them seems like a good way to make people successful and turn frustrated users into unpaid shills.
The idea will surface every now and then that AVAX is “wasting” money on memes when they should be supporting builders. They DO support plenty of builders, they’re just not supporting you. It’s not their job to throw money at something that currently has no momentum and nobody seems to want. If you build a product that people actually want and use, it will not be hard to get support. In the immortal words of Giraffe:
Attack of the French
Paps released a 140 page essay on some of his thoughts on the state of AVAX. Honestly I was expecting it to be much juicier but it ended up being pretty tame. There were some parts that contained valid criticism though, so I wanted to address those here.
If you weren’t on the chain at the time, what he’s talking about is the project called Delaunch ($AI9000) which was essentially supposed to be our version of the Virtuals AI protocol on Base. Except by the time it launched the AI meta was mostly dead, the Delaunch protocol itself was nowhere near functional, and they botched their own launch of the AI9000 token.
It was clear that this was some kind of Avalabs pushed project because employees were tweeting things like “really love what they’re building” or “I’ve seen what’s coming and it’s going to be good” (it wasn’t).
This is representative of a strategy Avalabs has used in the past—copy/pasting things that worked elsewhere and trying to bring sub-par versions here long after the original meta has died (Anime NFTs, InfoFi, AI, Sports, etc etc). I think critiquing this is good, but to be fair it seems like they have learned from past mistakes and aren’t doing it anymore. Progress!
The other good point Paps made was talking about how FDN spent a TON of money on the memecoin presale projects with basically no coordination. I won’t pretend to know the best way to spend money on something, but I suspect that discussing it with the project itself would be a good start.
I’m sure they have legal reasons for not doing this, but c’mon it’s crypto. Open up a Signal chat, make a plan, and let’s ride. Blub in particular got the short end of the stick as it got completely top blasted early on, so obviously lots of people took profit and the coin tanked.
Maybe there’s an alternate timeline where the Blub buys were slower/more delayed and people ran with the memes, pumping the coin much higher. Possibly it would not have made a difference and it would still head to zero anyway. All coins do!
That’s all for this week! Apologies for any typos, this was a real write it and ship it scenario. There were some other stories but I have wedding stuff to do so there is no time! We lost Coop this week—everyone take a moment of silence for his time at Avalabs, he will be missed.
Also some anonymous account accused Luigi of insider trading the memecoin bids, to which I say bring back the insider trading! Bring back the crime! We are BEGGING you to bid coins again, feel free to insider trade them if you like, as long as the buying returns.
Tweet of the Week
RIP Coop