Avalore Dump Week #19
"Damn he's gonna talk about Bears and Salmon again" Edition
We’re back baby! Honeymoon is over (writing this from the airport on the way home) and it’s back on the grind. Well, now we have Christmas week. And then New Year’s. Damn! Busy schedule! No rest for the lore chronicler though.
Anyway, the main thing soaking up mindshare on AVAX CT this week is, you guessed it, Bears and Salmon. Sorry this space has been very BANDS focused these last few weeks, but it’s the main thing going on! I don’t think I’m biased! Let’s do the thing.
WL is a Scam??
I don’t like talking about this guy because, like his PFP, he really is an NPC. I’m also not entirely sure what he’s insinuating here, but I saw some people agreeing with this take that the short whitelist was somehow nefarious.
As one of the people who pushed for a short whitelist, let me just state that the reason it was short because I figured 3 minutes would be plenty of time for WL people to buy. I thought non-WLers or whales wouldn’t want to buy a token that had spent the last 20 minutes giving Nochillios and Arena Champions (no offense) an earlier entry.
It never even crossed my mind that people would have so little faith in the Arena product (more on this later) that they would assume it wouldn’t even work for the first 3 minutes! There was no psyop here!
I had time to go back and look at the numbers for the WL period, and there were upwards of 400 buys before the token went public. It finished above a 7M mcap, so clearly people were getting buys through.
The idea that “nobody had a chance to buy at WL price” is simply incorrect. Also, since the token ended the WL period at such a high market cap, you were likely better off waiting for it to retrace a few minutes later anyway!
Arena takes a big Load
Ok, now that we’ve shown that people were able to buy during the WL period, we need to address the fact that plenty of people had issues with the frontend. Perhaps, as Pilot Matt suggested above, it was silly for the team to assume that the frontend would be able to handle the load for such an anticipated token.
I’ll be honest, I did not use the site during the WL period as it was late and I was drunk. However, for your reading pleasure I’ve grabbed a few tweets from the timeline from some users about their experience:
So this is likely cherry picking (as I said, 400+ buys went through) but there were definitely some major issues that need to be addressed before the next big launch. Also the tweets are funny so I’m including them. Sorry!
Another thing that needs to be noted is that the default launch mechanics for Arena tokens involve “extending” the whitelist AFTER the token launch. This means that even if you were whitelisted, you might have had issues buying immediately on launch.
In the case of Bears and Salmon, the final WL extension happened 13 seconds after launch, so it’s possible people were spamming buy for 13 seconds and wondering why the TX wasn’t going through.
Overall there were clearly hiccups, but it’s hard for me to tell how widespread they are. Based on anecdotal evidence from people I know, I’d call this launch about 50% successful from a technical standpoint. Not great, but honestly better than I was expecting.
Paying the Team
So as we all know by now, dev Vitagliano full stacked his entire allocation for $12k within the first 5 minutes of the token being live. I do believe devs should get paid, but what he did was undeniably shitty and self-serving.
The team was in a hard position, as Vita worked on the initial application site but then was fired. Giga, out of the goodness of his heart, agreed to let Vita keep the allocation with some assurances that it wouldn’t be use like this. Giga choose salmon, Vita choose bear.
This of course brought team payments to the forefront, with people calling for things like paying the team in USDC or having vesting tokens. Let’s discuss that!
The argument for paying in USDC is basically that it stops this exact scenario. However, those USDC payments need to be made back somehow, likely by the team selling tokens. In general this is bad optics and it’s better to let the team sell their own tokens (see: sending 30m to Coinbase vs Luigi selling some of his own AVAX).
Also just to be clear, the team did pay a ton of people in USDC as well. Giga paid a total of around $20k to team members before launch. With a raise of ~$70k and about half that going to purchasing $ARENA for liquidity, that does not leave much runway for a project outside of selling its own tokens.
Ok so fine we’ll pay in tokens, but at least let’s make them vest! How has nobody thought of this!?
This one is pretty simple—nobody is taking a job for vested tokens. For founders this makes plenty of sense as it’s their project, but you think a website dev is going to attach their pay to the long-term success of someone else’s leadership? In crypto? Locking up the tokens for any amount of time will be a hard no from me, dawg.
So I guess in summary there’s no perfect option. Paying people in allocation is fine, you just need to be careful about how much you give them and figure out if they will be dicks or not.
PrIvAtE pReSaLe???
I’ll be brief with this one because I think it’s dumb. If you spent months and months building up a project, would you not give access to your friends? If you released a coin today, and you have people that you’ve been friends with for years, you’re not giving them anything?
If that’s you, I’m happy you’re not my friend!
The “private presale” was small—it was a paid salmon allocation for some of Giga and Smoothies’ friends. I think that’s pretty reasonable. Maybe he gave access to more people than I would have, but not by much. Every coin has things like this, it’s just something you need to learn to accept. Moving on!
The $Arena Flywheel
One of the main selling points of Arena v2 was that tokens would be paired with $ARENA instead of AVAX. Turns out that’s not always a good thing! Arena supporters (and the arena team) noticed that the price of the token immediately went down after Bears and Salmon launch. Why???
Well, the Arena team has been quick to blame the “presale” aspect of the token.
I can see the argument—people are getting airdropped this new token (without buying $ARENA) and selling it through $ARENA to AVAX causing selling pressure. I could see how that would be bad for the token.
However, it’s important to remember that the $ARENA in the LP had to have been purchased too, right? There’s currently $40k worth of $ARENA in the LP, so those are tokens that are “locked” that otherwise wouldn’t have been.
There has obviously been overall more $BANDS buy volume than sell volume since launch (the token price is above launch price) so I’m not sure how much this argument holds water.
Personally I got Arena Champion for this launch and sold my $ARENA back to AVAX after the whitelist period. I imagine there were other people who did the same which may have caused a dump.
Also the token now has $1.5M worth of liquidity on chain, so I’m not sure this type of stuff could be moving price down 22% on it’s own.
Either way, this shouldn’t be a problem anymore! New presales will be adding AVAX LP! I find this pretty annoying because as someone who was working on the launch strategy for this token, I would have much preferred to launch with an AVAX LP. But alas! We live and we learn!
Bad Week for Baghdaddy
Uh oh! Moonbags got drunk on a space and talked shit about Nobs! Full disclosure: I was not in this space, so this is secondhand. I’m spreading rumors! This is a true smut column now!
I don’t have much to add other than the above summary.
Wait a minute…
It was a paid body double he met! Not the real Nobs! Now I’m wondering if the Nobs I met was a body double as well. She didn’t seem that smart either. Hmmmmmmmm.
Uh oh again! Dokyo team is quitting due to “differences in alignment!”
I think the short summary here is they haven’t heard from Moonbags in two months, so decided it’s time to pull the plug.
I don’t know who else is on the team besides Hazy honestly, but I guess now there is no team!
I find it hilarious that they put up with Brando for so long, but a couple months of Bags and they just can’t take it anymore. Personally I’d prefer Moonbags!
Everyone has their breaking point I guess. And now (hopefully) Dokyo can fade into the ether and I don’t have to hear about it or its IP ever again.
Ok that’s all I’ve got for this week. I’m going to miss my flight if I write any longer. Editor’s note: didn't miss it, sending this from the plane.
Sorry but I didn’t have time to pull many punches (or edit) this week! So it goes, sometimes.
Overall the Bears and Salmon presalers are up more than 5x, the launch on Arena had issues but was not horrible, and Dokyo is gone! It’s not a bad week!
Next article will be written from the good ol’ US of A baby. Freedomland! See you there.
Tweet of the Week
Bullish on dokyo takeover
👌🏽 Specktakularrr!