Avalanche Real Talk Summary

Plus some points I wanted to make but forgot to

Thank you everyone who turned up to last night’s spaces. We went on for 4 hours which is incredible and it was great to hear from so many voices. I forgot to record the spaces because I’m a massive idiot so I’ll try to condense all the main taking points below.

On the 1 million dollar plan

Everyone unanimously liked the first part of the plan involving a Shark Tank competition for NFT projects where $500k was up for grabs. The second part using the other $500k to sweep floors was more debatable however. My intention for this was not to artificially inflate floor prices, but rather, to protect investors from getting burned. Too many times this summer we’ve seen NFTs mint for 2 AVAX and immediately get listed for 1.95 AVAX right after. This is a serious issue because not only does it prevent growth of our ecosystem, it makes us lose investors.

There were some suggestions that the money would be better off spent on a PR campaign, similar to how there was a PR campaign for Avalanche across the New York subway. I disagree. That stuff only builds awareness, but you still need to drive the customer down the rest of the funnel and that costs a lot of time and money. We’re better off trying to convert people who are already aware of Avalanche but not here yet, such as guys who are avid NFT collectors on Ethereum, Solana, Tezos for example.

We should try to differentiate ourselves as a chain than to copy what other chains are doing

I agree and if I had to harbour a guess, I assume this was Ava Labs’ intent when they made a big push for gamefi. The issue is that up till now, there’s only been a few verticals that have found product market fit: DeFi, NFTs and stablecoins. If you take away the token incentives, gamefi hasn’t found product market fit yet. That’s not to say it will never, it may just need more time. I don’t have the answer to this. It’s a tough problem to solve, but you have to commend Ava Labs for going for it.

We don’t need any more of the same PFPs. We need innovation

Innovation should always be the end goal, but I disagree that we need innovation from day 1. Innovation is done in small steps, not in one large one. Right now we’re operating in 1st gear and you’re suggesting we shift into 6th gear right away. I’m suggesting we to go to 2nd, then 3rd, then 4th, etc first. We need to do the basics right before we can start building on the exciting stuff like xNFTs, dynamic NFTs, etc.

You came off very aggressive and arrogant in this tweet. Were you trying to attack Ava Labs or Pangolin?

fish🔺 | 🌊📘 @cryptofishx

If you don't like this rhetoric, you're not gonna like what I'm gonna say next. Remember Baguette and Partyswap? How about AVAXTreez? How about GB? All that were being promoted by Emin or Kevin at one point. Case in point.

fish🔺 | 🌊📘 @cryptofishx

I change my statement. The issue isn't that Ava Labs is too hesitant to back a favourite; the issue is that they've backed too many losers. Like Pangolin - millions spent so they can go on some obscure chain no one has ever heard about. Start👏backing👏winners

There’s a crowd of “OGs” who act entitled simply because they were here early and I don’t like it. I am also an “OG” myself - I started my crypto career at Snowball in February 2021 before starting Trader Joe. Hell, I even worked at Sherpa Cash and Pandaswap, the latter which turned out to be run by the most delusional and incompetent team I’ve ever worked with. If either team came out today and asked Ava Labs for financial support because they were one of the first projects and Ava Labs said yes then I would be absolutely livid. Said “OGs” then like to use decentralisation and the ethos of fairness to prove that they deserve something. But I also got a wakeup call for the “OGs” - crypto is also about not clinging to legacies and about breaking down establishments. The heuristic for who gets what cannot be fairness alone. There has to be a sense of meritocracy involved.

Also let me just say, being here early means nothing - you are easily replaceable. The market decides who wins and it doesn’t care one bit about sentiment. Don’t think for a moment we’re not in the same boat either; yes we’ve been the largest DEX for quite some time now but we’re very well aware that our position is fragile. Hence why we’ve been hard at work on the Liquidity Book.

My criticism towards Ava Labs is that they weren’t strict enough on who they pushed publicly in the past. Consequently, they got burned because a lot of those projects turned out to be flops and it seems like they’ve refrained from championing native projects because of that. A lot of builders have privately voiced their frustrations to me about Ava Labs constantly pushing foreign projects over native ones and I suspect it’s because of this. I don’t think this is the right approach either. Local projects need to be championed. It’s important for branding and chain identity. But it’s a very hard problem to solve without offending people.

Your tone of voice came off as very harsh

Yes I agree. I don’t like to beat around the bush; I’m very direct. A lot of context gets missed when you tweet and I can definitely improve the delivery.

On Ava Labs favouriting us

I need to say this on record because there’s been so many rumours swirling about, some that are outright absurd like Ava Labs giving us a $20 milllion grant (I wish).

We’ve never been favourited by Ava Labs ever. People forget that Pangolin was the unofficial official DEX at the time and when we first launched, we had to fight a fight where the cards were stacked against us.

“But didn’t Ava Labs invest in you?”

Yes they did just around Avalanche Rush in August. But the amount was very low; they must’ve been 5th on the cap table. I’m not kidding when I say that some of our telegram admins probably own more JOE than they do. And the fundraise certainly did not contribute to us overtaking Pangolin - by that time we were already neck and neck.

Also, want to know a fun fact? We first spoke with Ava Labs in July and they had the chance to invest in us when we were $0.02, but they took their time and fumbled the bag, so they might even be reeling about that still, who knows.

Furthermore, we don’t ask Ava Labs, Emin or Kevin to promote us whatsoever. No spaces, no tweets or RTs. In fact, the first time I ever spoke to Emin or Kevin was March this year at the Summit.

“But didn’t you receive Avalanche Rush funds?”

Yes we did, to the tune of $4 million. But we spent it all on incentivising community farms likeYAK/AVAX, SNOB/AVAX, PEFI/AVAX, etc. Unlike Pangolin’s incentives which was all put into the single-sided staking for PNG, we did not even incentivise the JOE/AVAX farm. It was all completely for the community.

It’d be different if you were a random guy on Twitter. But you’re the founder of a big project. You scared me when you spoke out like that

There’s this unwritten rule that founders have to act in a certain way and shouldn’t respond like that publicly. I don’t quite agree with that fully. It’s the same with doctors, which I used to be many years ago. For 99% of the the time you should conduct yourself with perfect bedside manner, but once in a while you’ll get that one patient who is trying to cross the boundaries and won’t stop to get what they want and with those people you just have to stamp your foot down and tell them they are out of line. If you’ve ever worked in the emergency room you’d know what I’m talking about.

On taking criticism

Some criticism is justified and we’ll happily take it on the chin. Like when Joepegs was first launched, people criticised us that there wasn’t even a search bar. They were right, we rushed the launch and came up out with a hackathon version of the app. But we’ve since delivered all the features people were asking for and more, yet the same people are still trying to find things to criticise us about. At that point they need to look in the mirror and ask themselves if they’re just being petty.

On toxicity and disgruntled builders in the community

There’s been a lot of subtweeting and passive aggression brewing in the community for quite some time and it’s time to address these issues and talk transparently, which was the purpose of yesterday’s spaces. Smaller projects feel like bigger projects are trying to eat their lunch. Smaller projects feel like the game is rigged because they feel Ava Labs supports the bigger projects. Bigger projects don’t feel this is the case because Ava Labs only champion foreign projects. Bigger projects just want to grow the pie but are frustrated that they’ve seen a plateau in user growth. We have members of the community trying to see a David vs Goliath battle by pitting builders against each other. The list goes on. You won’t hear about this on Twitter because they only voice their concerns privately, but there’s a lot of disgruntled builders here. I’ll put my hand up and say I’ve definitely added fuel to the fire with my words lately, but I feel it’s important to draw the boundaries and I’ll draw it when it comes to two things:

• You start attacking the projects we work with - we work with a lot of projects through our launchpad and farms. For some reason some people feel the need to DM these project founders and abscond them on how their project is destined to fail. Even Gabe Weis was receiving DMs how he’d never mint out because 5 AVAX was too high. He also commented how in all his years in crypto, he had never received hate ever until he came here. This is a horrible way to welcome a new artist and if this is who we are as a community, then we’re going to have issues bringing new projects and new investors on board.

• You’re an “OG” who attacks other builders - first off, if you’re having to call yourself an OG then it means you had relevance once and you’re not relevant anymore so you try to stay relevant by attacking the builders who are actually doing stuff. I got a tip for you: try to stay relevant by continuing to build instead.

Why should Ava Labs be championing local projects? Ethereum Foundation certainly doesn’t and look how Ethereum has turned out

I disagree with this sentiment. Ethereum is an outlier because it was the first dApp chain. If you look at the L1 space though, it’s becoming increasingly crowded. People like to rank them according to stats like TVL, transaction count, Github commits. But what’s more important than that is the underlying story and narrative, and local projects play a big part in that. If you were to look at Defillama rankings, Avalanche is higher than Solana, but in terms of narrative, Solana definitely has the edge right now due to two native projects: MagicEden and DeGods, which are the hottest marketplace and NFT projects in all of crypto right now.

Now don’t get me wrong, when I say champion local projects I’m not suggesting to champion us. There’s lots of projects who have built great projects whom I believe haven’t received the mindshare they deserve. Off the top of my head: Platypus, Yeti, Hubble, Chikn, Vector.

Is there innovation happening here on Avalanche?

Absolutely. A lot of people who haven’t been here for a while still associate Avalanche as the copy pasta chain. For most of last year that was true. It first started with the DEX forks (we were the 12th) followed by the OHM forks. But starting this year we’ve seen new innovations. I’ve mentioned a few already and we’re also coming out with our new AMM, the Liquidity Book, very soon.

What I do think we do poorly at is marketing our innovations. That’s where Ethereum and Solana really excel. Opensea announced their new set of contracts, Seaport, a few months ago and judging from the reception on Twitter you’d think they’ve created an entire new standard, but really they’re not that different from the LooksRare contracts.

Take Metaplex on Solana as another example. We were checking them out the other day and they’ve built a bunch of cool tools to make it easier for developers to mint NFTs and upload their metadata. We realised we’ve built the same thing for our launchpad except they’ve packaged it up with cool names like Candy Machine and made great documentation for them.

So in general, we need to do better on the product marketing front. These products are novel but they don’t get talked about enough and that’s an issue.

The fact that Platypus has better pricing than Curve doesn’t get talked about enough. Yeti is a brilliant protocol that’s run by an incredibly smart team. They have guys on their team who are well-known in the MEV community. On Ethereum they would be superstars, so it’s crazy they’re not getting talked about here. Chikn’s tri-tokenomics is actually very novel. I’m quite certain if they were on Arbitrum people would rave about how novel their tokenomics is.

I hate to say it, but I do feel we don’t have enough intellectually curious people here. Guys who will deep dive into a whitepaper, nerd out and write a long tweet thread about it. Well, the ones that are we have already hired, ha. But we need more, a lot more. The other week we ran a Twitter spaces for the Liquidity Book and all the questions were about sJOE and veJOE. It was quite disappointing.

On giving support and recognition for the smaller projects who have been here quietly building for months

If a project has been here for months but has not received recognition then it can be one of a few things:

• Not enough people know about it - the marketing isn’t good

• People don’t like it - the product isn’t wanted

Projects often ask us to use our broad platform to help promote the smaller projects and believe me, we have done so a lot in the past. But in my experience, most problems fall into the 2nd category and no matter how hard we try, if the market doesn’t want it then there’s nothing we can do to change that.

Look, I know how it feels. It’s a tough pill to swallow. You can’t fight the market. You put your blood, sweat and tears into building something and you want it to succeed so bad, but this is what entrepreneurship is about. Don’t take it personally; it doesn’t mean you are bad, it simply means you might need to pivot. Take the Vector team for example - they started off with Magnet DAO which was a flop, but they pivoted and created a product that’s turned out great.

On not receiving Ava Labs’ support

Let me reiterate, you don’t need their support to win. We certainly did it without their help. And don’t feel too bad if they don’t support you. If it makes you feel better, we have investors who participated in our fundraise who won’t even respond to our messages.

On needing some kind of builders DAO

I’m 100% aligned that this is what we need, badly. Actually, this should be the top priority and I’ve already expressed this to Ava Labs privately - getting more quality builders here. I would love to see our own Gitcoin and developer DAO. I’ve tried to do my part by creating the Build Guild discord and running several bounties like the arbitrage bot, liquidation bot and the mint bot coming up, but it’s hard to manage this with my other priorities.

Closing note - the best way to get support is to give value back to the community

Giving true value back to the community has to be a completely selfless act. Not one that is veiled as such like “you have to support my project because I’m trying to do ______ on the blockchain”. You’re fooling no one - that’s a selfish ask guised as helping the community. Figure out what the community needs, build it and that’s your value right there. I’ve already mentioned that we need a builders DAO and a grants program like Gitcoin. Some people have built analytics tools for free. Others host weekly spaces sessions to bring the community good vibes. Be that guy that everyone wants to help and you’ll get all the support in return.