Price is going down and the people are getting restless! Some have left for BSC, but the rest of us are still here. Vibes are not super high, but as a result I am happy. Bad vibes = good content! Nice work generating some talking points this week guys, let’s keep it up!
Spicy Rich vs Exodus
Big drama in the Arena world this week! I’m mostly unfamiliar with these names as I don’t travel in Arena circles but I will do my best to summarize.
Spicy Rich posted an essay (seriously, it’s long) about how Kairon and Exodus are the same person. As a refresher, Kairon is the one who released and rugged $LUDUS—a topic from the Lore Dump Week 7. Exodus is a reply guy who generically bullposts AVAX and started around the time of the MindoAI campaign (covered in week 6 of the Dump). He was an AVAX Team1 member as well as had some kind of involvement with the Arena team.
The TLDR here is that they both (and some others) were depositing to the same Binance wallet address upwards of 30 times over a span of a few months. Sounds like the same person to me! Rich went on to post about how they have similar “social footprints” which is a bit more dubious, but sharing a deposit address is a pretty big red flag.
Exodus then defended himself by saying that Kairon was actually just a friend who he loaned 80 AVAX to over a few months. Side note: Exodus, I’ll write nice things in the next article in exchange for friendship status. Happy to receive an 80 AVAX loan!
When asked to show any evidence of their communications, Exodus said that their TG history had been nuked and provided this completely normal, totally natural chat log:
He said something like “I don’t have TG on my phone so he sent me wallet addresses on Twitter” which is a fine excuse I guess. This looks exactly like my Discord chat history with myself as I pass notes between devices. Interesting!
He then provided some kind of roundabout explanation for why he did not join the presale himself. It doesn’t really make much sense to me—if someone I knew well enough to loan a couple thousand dollars was launching a presale, I would probably at least discuss it. On the other hand, if I wanted to burn one of my MANY alt accounts rugging a presale, there’s no chance I would interact with it at all from my main. On a completely unrelated note, watch out for a presale on The Grotto L1 coming soon!
So what’s the verdict? I’m officially filing this one under “I don’t care.” Either they’re the same person, or they’re close enough to be transacting with the same deposit address and messaging on telegram/twitter frequently. Both scenarios don’t look great for Exodus and there’s really no way to know for sure. I’d lean towards assuming that Rich is correct and they are the same person. But like I said, who cares! Shitty stuff happening regardless!
Timeline Inhales Copium
AVAX has retraced most of it’s recent run-up and is now dangerously close to the dreaded $27 mark. This, combined with the short but violent explosion of BNB memes and price has left a sour taste in the community’s mouth.
I think the main reason for this sour taste is that Avalabs/Foundation have made a clear shift away from community-facing goals towards institutional developments. On-chain and Twitter activity is of course spurred largely by community (see: degen) related activities, so users of the chain are feeling a bit left behind.
Employees and KOLs have been posting non-stop about various different institutional partners, RWAs, DATs, you name it. This is all stuff that has no effect on people who actually use the chain daily, so it’s easy to be frustrated when seeing this messaging as other chains are focusing on their communities.
Ava Labs continues to hammer home the “record setting” transaction counts and DEX volume on chain. I assume this must be an attempt to pump numbers for future institutional partners, as anyone actually using the chain can see that these numbers are completely manufactured.
From a community perspective, what they see are DATs purchasing off-market tokens at 60-70% discounts and 17.42B in wash trading volume. Naturally this will start to piss people off, especially as other ecosystems seem to be more in-tune with their users on twitter. Community members are beginning to feel like the chain is just not made for them and are starting to look elsewhere which is quite sad.
I won’t pretend to have all the knowledge of what’s behind the scenes so I can’t really say whether this strategy will work or not, but I do think some of these gripes have merit. I suspect that Ava Labs is coming fresh off of dumping a TON of money into Arena shitters and are now course-correcting in the opposite direction, which is fair.
Hopefully we can find a happy medium sometime soon. I guess that’s one of the downfalls of trying to be the “everything” chain.
It also doesn’t help that Emin clearly has contempt for the more degen sides of crypto, while that makes up a large part of what the community enjoys. In the meantime we can cope-post a bit as we wait for the pendulum to swing back our way (hopefully).
Friday is Declared “Early in the Week”
That’s all for this week! Thanks again to Blaze for stretching out the launch and giving me more content. We shall discuss it in next week’s article! Maybe? I hope so!
Tweet of the Week
Another great weekly summary of “our AVAX community” experience (clearly, as you pointed out, not in sync with the chain leaders experience).
Again, I enjoy your writing style. And the comments (in the smaller, lighter font) are perfect asides.
Another great article, can’t wait for [redacted]!