Avalore Dump Week 22
"Finally some good drama" Edition
Congratulations on finding this post! It must have been hard to get here amongst all the Twitter articles on vibe coding Polymarket arbitrage bots. This article will NOT be about that, unfortunately. Please look elsewhere for generational wealth opportunities.
It seems like we actually have some things to talk about this week! It’s been a bit dry through the holidays, so it’s nice to have some Juicy™ drama to talk about. Let’s dive in!
War on Baghdaddi
Moonbags returns to Twitter with a manifesto (it’s long, I cut it down for you above) after a small hiatus.
The main points are that he’s a good guy at heart because he didn’t dump his own Juicy allocation on everyone’s head, has been grinding hard, and he is really upset at people for not understanding how startups work.
Of course Tactical Retreat has a lot of Moonbags’ wallets tagged and took this opportunity to point out that he had in fact been selling his Juicy!
Moonbags then fired back, saying that only a “moron” would make this accusation, and that the wallets people are sharing as his are misattributed. The people sharing them know nothing!
If you’re going to call Tac stupid, you had better be correct. He’s retired now and has all kinds of free time! I won’t rehash the whole article, but if you haven’t read it you should read it here.
The TLDR is Moonbags sold on tons of wallets that are easily traceable to him (things like payments from past jobs, transfers from his Friendtech wallet, etc) and he also defaulted on loans (see: sold) for about 16.5% of supply! On top of this, he was offering OTC deals at discounts in the 20-60% range that were dumped immediately (also selling). Uh oh!
People will poke a lot of fun at Moonbags for launching and moving on from so many projects—we do so ourselves in the great cover art by Frogwell this week. I don’t really think that’s the issue here, as plenty of people have made good money off his work and he does put lots of time and effort into each one.
I also don’t even really think there’s an issue with him selling. He’s free to sell his token if he wants. If he needs to sell to keep the project alive that’s just the way it goes sometimes.
It’s really just a character issue that has people so worked up. He plays the role of “experimenter” which I will always support, but when he is working on something he will constantly be yapping about how it’s going to be amazing and his holders will be so rich if they just believe in him.
This is the part that people are really mad about. It has nothing to do with his actions, and everything to do with his words and the way he carries himself. As Nobs says above, people will be very quick to jump on mistakes if you’re cocky and are not properly managing expectations.
It’s these kind of holier than thou interactions that put people off and make them more likely to read his actions as malicious.
In his mind, what he’s building is cool and new and real. These other people are building simple things for simple people—Moonbags is Steve Jobs in a world full of founders with no vision.
I don’t think he means to come across this way (who would?) but he does, and that’s the real reason why people “witch hunt” him.
Another “prev: Solana” Has Hit the Timeline
We have a new ex-Solana employee in town! Kevin Ricoy was brought on to Ava Labs as the new Director of External Media. I didn’t know what that means so I assume you don’t either: he leads Ava Labs public image by managing media relations, public relations and social media.
Tough start to his campaign as it began with him typing up some incredibly long-winded soup and then immediately deleting it. Oops! I’ll highlight some parts I found noteworthy, but if you want you can read the whole thing here.
Firstly, this whole post was in response to Zedi (friend of the newsletter, yeller at clouds) calling out the rampant fake transactions we’ve been seeing over the last few months. This is something we’ve talked about many times in this article, so I will try to be quick.
Zedi has found that approximately half the transactions on Avax are coming from two botnets just transferring money back and forth to each other. He has never attributed this to Ava Labs specifically, but with them constantly bullposting stuff like transaction numbers it seems plausible it’s them.
He did some follow up research that I will link for the nerds here but the short of it is that our chain has A LOT of fake activity, even when compared to the obvious wash trading that goes on elsewhere.
I wanted to highlight this because it was part of a larger point that the Solana community is what jump-started adoption and price recovery, not foundation or labs. I guess this could be partly true, but do we really think Solana meme season was fully organic? Is he going to argue that Foundation/Labs wasn’t spending tons of resources to make memes take off on Solana?
I suppose it’s possible—I don’t really have any inside info here. I just believe it’s highly unlikely that something like that $BOME (Book of Memes) thing could reach $1B market cap in a single day, getting listings on major exchanges within 6 hours (!) of launch without help from Solana Foundation/Labs.
My guess is they were doing the same types of things we were doing during our meme seasons, just in a less detectable way and at a larger scale. Or maybe they benefitted from the fact that nobody can read Solana block explorers. Who can say!
So this brings me to the final point, and one that hits on something I try to harp on in this space. I agree it’s not Labs/Foundations job to completely manufacture interest/demand here. However, I would say it is their job to amplify the things that people are excited about. They should be fanning the flames of what’s good in the ecosystem in order to draw more people here.
Everyone is excited about a new token? Ok, let’s set up a plan to buy it so people will be making money and posting about it all over the timeline. That’s how you get new people here, not by constantly tweeting about how active the chain is because it passed some new contract deployment count milestone.
The idea that “trying to grow consumptive demand and support the ecosystem” is “never promised and far from guaranteed” is incredibly disheartening. If they’re not going to be doing that, why are we here? People are on AVAX because they believe in the chain and the people running it, but as that belief falters, it will be tough to stay. Why would I want to use a chain where something as basic as “supporting the ecosystem” is not guaranteed?
To close this section on a lighter note, I thought this post from Kno was hilarious and Kevin’s spotlight of it shows that he probably is a good dude and is willing to mix it up with the community. That’s all we can really ask for, so I look forward to seeing how this plays out in the future. He did delete the tweet after all, so maybe it’s not fully representative of his views.
That’s all the news I’ve got for this week! Feels great to have things to write about again. Keep up the good work folks! I expect a few more deleted tweets and witch hunts next week. Please schedule them for Monday-Tuesday so I can compile all the relevant data.
I will say I'm slightly considering turning these into X articles for more reach, but I also do this for fun and like this format. Let me know if you think I should change it in the comments!
Tweet of the Week
EPIC
tweet of the week indeed