Avalore Dump Week 24
"Community is grumbling" Edition
Wow! Some weeks it feels like I’m squeezing the life out of two tweets trying desperately to hit some kind of made up minimum article length I have in my head.
This is not one of those weeks!! What a flurry of activity on the timeline. My newsletter weekly notes section is completely packed to the brim. I don’t even know where to start or how to structure this one as there’s so much to talk about. I counted and I have 30 tweets saved for this week.
I don’t know how this is gonna work, but let’s do the news. Buckle up.
Who Should Get a Grant?
You may not remember this as it was about 15 community crashouts ago, but the week’s drama started when Andy posted that he had been denied a grant for his current project, We Keep Winning.
This of course brought grants to the forefront of everyone’s mind. If Andy wasn’t able to get one, who was?
Tac pulled up the list of projects who most recently received grants through the Retro9000 initiative, and needless to say he was unimpressed. There was some back and forth here where Kriddo defended all the French projects (shocking) but after Tac did some research on these, they seem to be mostly tech slop with barely working projects (also shocking).
Long tweet incoming, you can skip it and just read his final paragraph to get the idea.
Now I’m not trying to say Andy deserves a grant over these projects just because he’s an AVAX member. Obviously certain things fit the program and certain things don’t.
Also I’m not trying to say that it’s bad if projects who receive grants end up failing. This is natural as not everything will succeed. In this case though, the grant was intended to be retroactive—it was supposed to be a reward for already achieving some level of success.
What I AM trying to say, and this is important context for later, is that historically these grant programs have not produced value for users of this chain.
If you scroll up and look at the projects that got funding, did any of them have any impact on you? Maybe you got rugged on Memoria or Koroshi or something, but other than that, anything positive? If you’re an FChain power user let me know in the comments!
They’re Not Buying our Memes, Bro
We finally got a definitive answer on FDN’s stance on memecoins! It’s probably not the one most people wanted, but at least we can move on now.
I won’t talk about this specifically too much, but I will say this. People in crypto really want two things:
Make money
Have fun
Memecoins provide those two things in abundance, which is why the memecoin program is what many consider one of the “golden ages” of AVAX. Lots of money was made, lots of fun was had. To this date, I believe memecoins are one of the only things that has actually found product-market fit in crypto.
HOWEVER, and this is important, memecoins are not the ONLY thing that will satisfy the community. Avalabs members act like the community is mad because they’re not buying memecoins (true) and that nothing else they do will be able to satisfy the masses (false!!). This is another common theme and will come up again later!
Yes, the community is mad because almost everyone views the memecoin program as a success and Avalabs has now outright stated it won’t be coming back. But that is not the main frustration!
One of the reasons this is so frustrating is because the other initiatives (see the “Who Should Get a Grant” section above) do not feel community aligned and have led to very little impact on the average user.
That ticks the “direction” box that Excel mentioned above. Now let’s talk about “transparency!”
30M To Coinbase
Wow! I’m inserting myself into the story! Just disgusting.
I won’t say much here as this horse has been beaten to death. Those of you familiar with Hanlon’s Razor may be wondering if Kevin is trying to insinuate that the FDN is acting out of stupidity, not out of malice. Is that better?
Anyway, the FDN doesn’t have a responsibility to explain to us what is happening, but they should also not be surprised that people have latched on to the “30M to Coinbase” meme so tightly. If you want to be silent on it that’s fine, but these are the consequences.
I think any amount of transparency would go a long way here, so we’ll see what they decide to cook up. For the record I think it’s unlikely that these are literally all full stack sells. But what do I know?
Build Games (or Anything, Doesn’t Have to Be Games)
We finally got clarity on what the hyped 1/20 announcement was! AVAX announced “Build Games,” a grant program where the winning projects will receive a share of a $1M prizepool.
General reaction to this seems to be pretty decent, but reaction from the core AVAX community was, well, it was bad. Reaction was so negative that tensions between the community and the AvaLabs employees working on the program were really starting to escalate. I even wrote an emergency mid-week article! Please read that as I don’t want to be repetitive here and go over the same points.
I also won’t talk about how obviously people would think that a program called “Build Games” is asking them to build games. That would be a layup! I won’t mention how they could have just called it “The Build Games” or “Builder Games” to get around this. Many people have pointed it out so I don’t want to pile on here!
The summary of this whole Build Games situation is that people feel misled because this massive announcement was hyped up, and it turned out to be a type of program that (see: the grants section above) hasn’t had a big impact on the actual community. That doesn’t mean this particular program won’t have an impact, but we have lots of data on these things and they have yet to trickle down into value for the users of our beloved chain.
Personally I’m not a big fan of these types of initiatives as I think they tend to reward founder slop and not necessarily projects that benefit the chain. I think people with good ideas will just build them and they will gain traction. Good founders won’t wait around for a program incentivizing them to build. The types of people this tends to attract are people looking to cash in and leave.
THAT BEING SAID, I am willing to reserve judgement until we see what comes from this. It seems like people from AvaLabs are starting to listen, and they will reward projects that will have tangible effects on the users. I believe!
Another major pressure point is the fact that this announcement comes at a time where basically the only thing going on in the community is Bears Den—a similar community run program where projects are competing for grants.
Again, this is a problem that I believe can be solved fairly easily. The prevailing sentiment from Ava Labs employees is that the community will fud everything they do no matter what. I don’t think that’s true—the community just doesn’t feel seen or heard at all.
For example, if Ava Labs announced tomorrow that Bears and Salmon will be the first confirmed recipient of a Build Games grant, and that they’ll get $10k (or whatever) to give to the winner of their competition, this would be HUGE for showing the community that you care about them, and would instantly win a lot of people over.
On another note, I don’t want to end this section without mentioning the MUCH bigger (40m vs 1m) fund that was announced the day after Build Games. This initiative is cool because in theory, apps that gain actual traction will be rewarded. In practice, we have not seen many good things come from the Retro9000 program and these numbers will be very easy to game. Again, I will choose to remain optimistic for now.
My Call to Action
I want to end this article with a call to action for both Ava Labs and you—my beloved, down-bad AVAX community members.
To Ava Labs,
I promise the community loves this chain and wants to support you. People are fed up because almost all messaging/initiatives seem to be written from an ivory tower without much care for anything happening in the community. There are in fact announcements that will make people happy. They exist! And not just about buying memecoins!
I understand that there are new employees who don’t know all the lore, but the reality is that the community cannot be expected to take everything on good faith, especially in crypto. As Excel said, “Give the lads something to be bullish on.” It feels like we haven’t gotten that in a long time. If you guys take care to shape the narrative towards how things will tangibly benefit the community, people WILL react positively. Just make people feel heard and you will get lots of support.
To the community,
We can’t do what they think we’ll do and fud every announcement for no reason. I encourage you all to try to be level-headed. Ava Labs is doing what they think is best for the chain, whether you agree with them or not. Please try to keep disagreements civil. Show them that we can be reasonable, that there are things we really will support.
And please, please, PLEASE, if some announcement comes out that actually seems bullish for us, we MUST shout it from the rooftops and amplify it. Show leadership that if we actually are thrown a bone, we’ll run with it.
If cool projects start coming out of these builder initiatives, let’s make sure to give credit where it’s due and rally behind our chain.
Wow what an eventful week! Long article!
It feels like things are really starting to come to a head on our chain. I think we’re at a pretty major crossroads where the community will either start to completely abandon the chain OR will be forged into diamonds through bullish community/Ava Labs feedback loops. Either way it’s an exciting time to be here!
Tweet(s) of the Week
Long week, so more tweets!
what can i say
banger
what can i say
banger
What can I say, banger