Welcome to the first weekly edition of the AVAX Lore Dump! It feels like there’s a hole in the market for some chronicling of AVAX lore and I will make a poor attempt to fill it. Most of the articles about AVAX tend to be for either DeFi nerds or general tech nerds, but I haven’t seen much for us average joes who are just trying to extract and chill (more on that later). I’ve been looking to practice my writing more and this seems like a good excuse.
Some general info since this is my first post:
I am just a community member. These thoughts are not representative of anyone/anything else. I will make good faith attempts at understanding arguments but no promises about neutrality.
I don’t know if there will be enough to talk about weekly, but I will at least try to pump these out every week for now.
I FREQUENTLY USE EM-DASHES—THIS IS NOT WRITTEN BY CHATGPT! IT IS A FUN AND USEFUL GRAMMATICAL TOOL—DEAL WITH IT!
I will likely only comment on things that have made it onto my timeline. Also I’m on Japan time right now so I miss a lot during USA day time. If you’d like to submit some lore for next week’s discussion, you can do so via this form.
I guess that’s it! If you’re still here, welcome to week 1 of writing these until AVAX hits $200.
Fortune Chain 🟢
Ket founder/savior of AVAX Nobs Fud recently unveiled his plans for Fortune Chain. Is the ‘z’ at the end of the twitter account real? Is the chain real? I tried to gather info from the author of the greenpaper himself, but I’m still not sure.
I don’t know if it’s what we need right now, but I do know that it’s what this first article needed as it prompted a banger tweet from someone who may become a staple of this series:
I don’t have much more to add here—he hit the nail on the head. Congrats on the retirement, Tactical Retreat! Maybe people would respect you more if you stopped working on things that “no one’s genuinely bullish on” and started directing your attention toward projects that people actually want. Perhaps a version 2 of a token launcher that nobody used the first time?
Real or not, Fortune Chain(z) posts have good engagement and seem to have riled up the AVAX community. There are talks of flywheels and that always gets the people going (shoutout Dani Sesta and his flywheel of launching then logging off). I have yet to find a reason to hop over to an L1, but I can easily be convinced if there’s max extracting involved. Next week I’ll either be writing about how Fortune Chain is the future of finance or how the bait was so good that it must be made real anyway. I suspect that whether or not it’s currently in production, Tac will eventually be bullied into doing it regardless.
Animation World Record
AVAX rallied the troops to break the record of most animators on an animation. I’ll be honest I believe I slept through this entire arc so I don’t have a ton to say here, but I have enjoyed seeing peoples’ frames. I’m not sure about the world record part but having the whole community collab on an art thing is a cool idea. I would have enjoyed making one of these. Well I would have enjoyed the idea of it at least, not sure I’d actually do it (Shoutout Dev and Draw NFT base coming Q4 2025).
AVAX Marketing
This post from Mert has sparked a bunch of back and forth between Luigi and community members on what exactly the issue with AVAX’s marketing plan is. I’m already tired of reading takes on this as there have been a few long posts about it so I’ll keep it short (note: not short).
To me the issue is that they don’t market to actual crypto users. The focus is on institutions and people who care about things like “the tech” and “RWAs” who I believe are a small subset of onchain users. I don’t think there’s much marketing targeted at someone like me, a typical blockchain community member.
“But Smitty, didn’t you just say you liked the animation campaign?” Sure, but I didn’t view it as marketing—I thought it could be a fun community activity. I have no idea why they slanted it towards marketing with things like incentivized referrals. Just trying to hit KPIs I guess? As an onboarding/marketing tactic it suffers from the same Steve Buscemi-esque tone that most AVAX user-targeted messaging has.
The best marketing is community led, and this only happens when people are having fun or making money. For example, I think the best marketing AVAX has ever done is sending KET to the moon. It was a coin almost everyone held, so they made people lots of money and everyone was euphoric on the timeline. However, they took this win and then tried to run the same playbook on a bunch of coins nobody really liked, punting a ton of money out the window for no real reason. A story for another time!
Damn, this wasn’t short at all! Sorry about that! TLDR is the marketing caters towards Institutions → Nerds → Boomers → then finally average users, so obviously CT does not like it.
Max Extraction from Hell
This week saw the launch of yet another presale project: Lucius from Hell by Vitagliano. I won’t speak too much about the launch specifics as there is no good way to launch a token and the aftermath was much more fun. Some blame has been placed on Vita for launching with presalers in massive profit, but honestly I think people would dump regardless. These tokens all speedrun to zero so people will get out when they can make the most money (immediately). I don’t know what Vita is planning for the future, but I do think he means well so now that there’s been a big shakeout maybe he can build it up.
The juicier part of the story is that Vita used critically acclaimed platform Arena Pro to launch his token since it can immediately buy out the full Arena curve + buy more from the LP. Since he was launching with much more AVAX than a full bonding curve, this was a sensible option. Arena Pro charges a fee for this service of 1% of the buy (approximately .8% here).
This is where things get fun. Notorious sponge V “knows how to max extract a little too hard” Q has access to the Arena Pro team wallet and sold this fee shortly after launch. This strategy was quite successful as the airdrop for the token had not gone out to the public, so he was able to frontrun the dump that followed after.
Before we get to the fallout let me give my personal thoughts. Deep Water Studios is running a service and charging for said service. Unfortunately we can’t pay AWS bills with AVAX memes (yet) so that requires selling tokens. Would I have sold the fee so quickly? No, probably not. But as I said, people will sell these things quickly—he was making the objectively correct decision. If you’re unhappy with this you should not be using the service OR should script the airdrop to go out at the same time as launch. I won’t speculate here on what’s best as THERE IS NO GOOD WAY TO LAUNCH A TOKEN.
Vita called out this sale in his postmortem, which led to some of the usual suspects complaining that the DWS cabal has ruined another project. This does not seem well-reasoned. Max presalers each got .58% of supply, only slightly less than VQ sold. If you want to call out his sales then fine, but it’s crazy to say that it killed the project.
This particular opinion should largely be ignored as I’m told this guy actually rugged some Solana project (GOBI?) so it’s just more blame shifting. It’s a shame because I do like his art. He is just one of many voices that spoke out against the big bad Tac/VQ menaces though:
The silent majority seems to not really blame Arena Pro for the token’s demise, and there have been some nice slam dunks on the timeline.
In the end I think Tac said it best—the whole thing boils down to people being mad that Tac and VQ sold a token before they did. As a presaler myself, I’m furious and will be DMing them asking for reparations. You should all do the same.
That’s all I’ve got for this week’s Lore Dump! I’m sure other things happened, but this is already too long. If next week is slow we can revisit some things that I’ve missed here or dive into the archives. If you’re still reading, please let me know what you thought as I crave feedback (if it’s positive).
— Smitty
Appreciate your words the way you wrote it down. Yeah its true tac and vq are nice men i have seen them since months but i did some research on them (the DWS) even as an artist i wanna work with those guys thats my dream to because i admire them learning from them and i agree with that they are the best people i have seen in space currently. Well done smitty took your time to elaborate things like these. Nice work. I Appreciate that.
Bullish. So glad I stuck it out here on AVAX, home of 9k errr I mean 1 million L1’s