Avalore Dump Week 30
"Crash-in" Edition
GM fellow AVAX enjoyooors! We’ve had a nice week of crashing out. It felt good to get some of that out of my system!
However, now I have hit the approved maximum length of crashout, so it’s time to crash back in! Mostly.
To start, one thing I wanted to answer is a question I got last week:
Why are you here if you’re always complaining??
The answer is in the cover piece of this article. I’m here because I think this community is full of the smartest, most creative people in the space. We invited a lot of these people to our wedding, and our friends Frogwell and Goose worked to make us the above image of our Dev and Draw community.
Those people are why I’m here! We talk every day, and they have become a large part of our life. I want to succeed on AVAX with them!
Ok, that’s enough sap! Let’s do news!
Post-Crashout Clarity
Overall feedback from the crashout article was pretty encouraging. I’ve had some good conversations with community members—seems like a lot of people are upset about the same things I’m upset about. We’re united!
I also had a bunch of conversations with Avalabs employees, and they appear to be taking this stuff to heart. I don’t want to get people’s hopes up because for now it’s mostly talk, but I do believe that our concerns are being addressed.
I thought this post from Kevin was particularly interesting, as it implies that they actually do care about us lowly AVAX CT plebs. Again, it’s just talk for now, but I have gotten so many of these types of responses that I am willing to give them some SMALL benefit of the doubt.
These things won’t change in a day, but having the CIO of the Foundation respond to the crashout article is a sign that we are being heard! Even if all his responses included some variation of the phrase “thanks for the color.”
His original question about what “fun” means was initially troubling to me as it sounded like we were destined to try to figure out what kinds of meaningless KPIs signal “fun” and then inevitably settle on some poor, corpo-pilled program to boost them.
HOWEVER, if we consider Kevin’s tweet about tracking community replies and sentiment, I feel pretty good that they can use that to figure out when we’re having fun.
More Grant Shenanigans
We had some good grant drama this week! I’m on my post-crashout, let’s-be-friends arc so I will avoid crashing out here again over this!
Basically, this Artery Chain (I only know them from the Play Memoria presale that speedran to zero) announced that they were shutting down since their grant money ran out. Not a good look for anyone involved!
This threw salt on the wound as we were already in our crashout arc, and community members took to Twitter to complain about the kinds of teams who receive grants.
There are sooooo many examples of teams being “onboarded” for a grant and then leaving or not contributing anything, and people are tired of it. I think all people want is for more grant money to go to teams/projects that we actually know and use.
I understand that the chain is allowed to want products here that are not necessarily targeting us CT users, but it feels supremely imbalanced.
Nobs even started an ACP to try and funnel funding to more community aligned projects and developers. Go vote on it here so we don’t have future announcements of projects doing nothing and then shutting down when they stop getting funding!
To sample this behavior, I had a look at the most recent cohort of Retro9000 recipients:
Now I’m sure you’ve unfortunately heard of The Grotto, and I have heard Paradise Tycoon thrown around as well, but I wanted to look at the other 4 projects.
I didn’t do much research honestly. I literally just went to their Twitter pages and clicked through to each of their websites.
Uh oh! This one didn’t even have a working website! Keep in mind that this is a RETROACTIVE grant, so it’s in theory based on work that they’ve already done.
This really angered me and confirmed my suspicions at the time!
However, I am post-crashout now, so I am willing to admit that maybe they are doing work that I just don’t know about. Maybe it’s a cool project and maybe I just unluckily tried to access their website during a brief outage that just so happened to be right after funding was announced.
Sarnavo seems to think so! And he was quick to reply to 500 posts once they put the website back up! Find someone who loves you as much as Sarnavo loves the Turf Network team.
Anyway, this grant stuff will be a touchy subject moving forward and probably something that people will be tracking. We’re not asking for much though! We just want future grants going to things that seem like real projects!
Speaking of future grants…
Build Games Round 1 Culling
Build Games emails have gone out and the number of projects has been culled down to around 400. This is actually pretty cool, because it means that even if every single project got funding, they would get $2.5k on average. Not bad!
But of course with denials for any kind of program, there were some nice crashouts on the timeline!
I will say this—cutting from 2000 projects to 400 is hard, and good projects are bound to get cut. Also, I think the process is doubly hard since a lot of applicants were applying with projects that already existed.
A lot of those existing builders are the ones who are crashing out the hardest. People who have been pouring their hearts into projects feel they are being overlooked. I asked Voh about this a bit, and she had this to say (yes I cleared permission to post this publicly! I respect my sources!!!11):
I respect this! If a project has been around for a while and has no motion or buzz, odds are pretty good that a grant won’t change that.
AVAX is small, and if you’re not able to get your project out there in our community I think some self-evaluation needs to be done. Either you have too much onboarding friction or people are just not that excited about it. It’s tough to hear, but once you figure this out you can start solving the problems and make things better. Money likely won’t be the solution!
Voh also threw in this chart (and gave me permission to post it!) which I found interesting:
So it looks like they’ve got a nice selection of projects from a very wide spectrum.
Part of me wonders if they will overcorrect here and we’ll end up with 93 funded ponzis (sorry, “gameFi flywheels”) launching on March 27th. Maybe we can stagger these things somehow!
I am still remaining hopeful that Build Games can be very net-positive for the eco, even if I have reservations. Again, we won’t know until it’s over! But I have post-crashout hope!
Chef PhillipAvax1
I don’t know what to say here really, but we got some incredible copypasta from this guy who has launched and rugged multiple arena coins. Including it for lore purposes:
He didn’t leave, by the way. Shockingly he still has “AVAX” in his twitter name and posted this less than 9 hours later:
Let’s check on that Lucy coin, it seems like it could be a real winner if it brought Phillip back to AVAX:
Well that’s all I’ve got for this week! Cautiously optimistic that I will not need to write another crashout edition for at LEAST a month.
As an aside, Frog and I are both working on separate Avalore-branded projects for Build Games. We’ll need to change from just a simple Substack sometime in the next few weeks to accommodate this, so don’t freakout if this newsletter moves to something like a news.avalore.xyz subdomain. It’s not a drainer! Well maybe it is. Only one way to find out!
Tweet of the Week
Smitty never disappoints!
Thank you, Smitty 💜