Avalore Dump Week 27
"Hopefully the FDN new hires care about us" Edition
Another week, another Avalore dump. Honestly felt like the timeline was a bit dead this week—people are too tired to even crashout anymore! Very sad. Please consider voicing your angry opinions over and over again. And for the love of god please do it EARLY in the week. Monday is a great day to crashout! Friday is not!
Thank you for your consideration. Let’s do the news.
Signs of Life on Chain?
I won’t get too excited just yet but it seems like after a long drought, people are starting to do things on chain again. We have multiple ponzis coming down the pipe, starting with Club Hash Cash by AVAX natives and top lads XRPant and Chris Fusillo.
This should be a good test of what the communities current appetite for clicking buttons is. I haven’t been following it as closely as I would have liked, as unfortunately our house lost both water and heat this week. However, it seems like people are at least having some kind of fun again, which is all a kid like me could really ask for.
In fact, we’re already getting copycats! Amazing! Maybe the ecosystem is really beginning to ramp up!
We also have the $EARLY ponzi coming from everyone’s favorite emo 17-year-old, Snaps. It seems like a novel concept, something about weighted reflections for early holders? I don’t know, I haven’t read the docs—I just clicked the buttons. Bring back degen season!
I won’t speak on the potential success of these projects. Last time I praised someone just for building, I got in trouble as people bought CAPY despite me saying that the token was probably dead on arrival (it was). BUT, I will be watching these with great interest to see if we can support experiments on chain again.
Nobs had a good tweet about it this week, but basically there’s very little incentive to build if there are no users. This is probably true for every chain except Solana now. If we can prove that building is profitable here, we will start to see more building. Shocking!
As an aside, this is probably why people wanted more financial support for Bears and Salmon. If a token that had the entire community excited could only top around $2M, why would anyone launch something here? It’s a proof of concept issue.
New FDN Hires
We had two new Foundation hires announced this week—Matias and Eric! Welcome to the spotlight guys! I’m sure you won’t face any criticism and will have a lovely, relaxing time on Twitter!
In all seriousness, it’s great that the first things they posted were about interacting with the community. I feel like I’m getting incredibly repetitive in these articles, so I really don’t want to keep going into what I think should change around here.
The good news is that I’m unemployed! I can “hop on a call” to discuss this at any time!
I will gently request that we ignore anything Jony talked about though!
The main thing he mentioned was tossing money at DEXes and lending protocols. This incentivizes mercenary capital that will come to LP/lend and then leave when the program is up. It also costs a TON of money. There’s so much money involved in these defi protocols that in order to actually move the APR needle you need to shell out very sizable amounts of AVAX. Overall I think this is not worth it!
It’s easy to shoot down ideas though and harder to propose your own. So I will indeed propose my own! Free of charge!
(TED talk incoming)
Avalanche Community Ecosystem Fund
I would establish the Avalanche Community Ecosystem Fund, which is geared towards actual community members and projects.
I would announce the first initiative, Retro Builder Games (title TBD). I would pledge $250k quarterly towards grants for people who built things that the community actually enjoyed that quarter. These are all retroactive—after you’ve already built a project or initiative, and it is completely live with users and traction, you can apply for what amounts to a reward.
We’ll have a panel of judges from the community (not CEOs of gaming and tradFi companies, but actual community members) who will vote on the winners for each quarter. The winners must have already built something that had a noticeable impact on the community. Ponzis, memecoins, Twitter-focused campaigns, newsletters (😏), anything that people enjoy.
This would create a culture of building on AVAX, and being rewarded for doing so successfully. I think this could have a much greater impact than front-loaded grants to mercenary builders, and would encourage people to just experiment.
For example, right now I’m working on a bunch of different projects but don’t really see a reason to apply to Build Games. They’re all small things that I think the community will like, but there’s no reason for me to jump through hoops in some “incubator” program for a chance at $5k. I’d rather just build, and I think many other people feel the same way. Rewarding people like that would create an incredible experimentation flywheel.
That’s my idea! End of TED talk.
Bad Community! Bad!
Ok now it’s time to channel my inner Voh and police what people are posting on the timeline! I saw a few things that made me sad this week so I want to call attention to them and scold the offenders!
First off, I want to scold Justin for attacking the AVAX tweet with the one-second Superbowl ad. It was well executed and part of the “funny” factor people have been asking for from the main account for years. Encourage this! Don’t shit on it!
To be fair, I think people are complaining because it was almost TOO realistic—they’re not complaining about the AVAX account being funny. I repeat for Avery, PEOPLE ARE NOT COMPLAINING ABOUT JOKES FROM THE AVAX ACCOUNT. THEY DIDN’T KNOW IT WAS A JOKE.
The account has been noticeably better lately and we must encourage this! Please, I beg you!
Then there was this by Whisky. Listen, I’ve already outlined why I don’t have much confidence in Build Games or Retro9000 to actually bring change to our on-chain experience. And of course I agree that people just building things (like Xrpant, Chris, and Wrath) will have a much larger impact, that’s why I proposed the Community Fund idea above.
HOWEVER, as I’m writing this, the signups for Build Games are literally still open! I’ll happily endorse a tweet like this in 3 months when all we have is a bunch of “sustainable businesses” and shitty L1s to show for these initiatives, but for now let’s give it a damn chance at least!
The programs are happening whether we like it or not. If we want our complaints to be taken seriously, we need to be reasonable.
OK!!!! That’s the end of my ranting this week. Can you mfers PLEASE save the drama for earlier in the week?? I just had to rewrite this shit in 30 minutes because you nerds decided to talk smack on the timeline on Friday at noon. Be better next week! See you then.
Tweet(s) of the Week
Love your content smitty!!