AVAX Lore Dump Week 3
Like sands through the hourglass, so are the grifts of our lives
Well it finally happened folks—we had our first down week of the Lore Dump era. I couldn’t find anything interesting to write about this week, so instead we will be traveling back in time to revisit some lore from AVAX past. It’s harder to find old tweets/screenshots so this one may be lighter on pictures. Sorry for those of you out there that can’t read! The rest of you, join me as we travel back through the wormhole into Hyperspace.
What was Hyperspace?
If by some miracle there are people reading this article who joined AVAX after Hyperspace (thanks for buying my bags, please stay and continue to buy them) I’ll just give a brief objective summary of the Hyperspace product before we get down to business.
Hyperspace was an NFT marketplace active on Sui and Solana that was encouraged to launch on AVAX in order to support a huge NFT incentive program on our chain. People would get points for trading/minting NFTs, and those points would be converted to AVAX at the end of each “season.”
The marketplace was run by Bryan Jun and Kam although to be honest I don’t know much about Kam. As far as I can tell there were few if any other employees. I assume they underpaid some devs to work for them as well. Oh, sorry! This was the objective part! What I meant was that they (allegedly) had devs working for them as well, and I’m sure they were full time and fairly compensated.
Why was Hyperspace?
A lot of people are confused why Ava Labs brought over a new marketplace for their incentive program. Hot take but I think they really had no other choice.
From what I’ve heard, the incentive program was all set to roll out on Joepegs before someone on their team said some derogatory things towards Dokyo, the NFT project that would kickstart the incentives (Dokyo will get its own courageous article sometime). Dokyo refused to launch there, so Joepegs was now off the table.
This left Salvor as the only remaining option, but at the time the website was still a bit clunky and not fit for the massive onboarding that this program was expecting. It was definitely not the powerhouse that it has grown into today. Once Joepegs was removed from contention, I don’t blame Ava Labs for bringing in some fresh blood. In theory, Hyperspace was a name known across multiple other chains and seemed like it could be a good fit.
How was Hyperspace?
For a small number of traders—the loosest possible definition of “trader” should be used here—the program was successful.
You can see from the PnL column on the left, but basically these people were just buying and selling hundreds of Dokyo NFTs per day at a loss, in the hopes that the points they racked up would pay out more in rewards.
For actual day to day use as an NFT marketplace however, the site was laughably bad.
My earlier questions about their dev team stem from this type of issue—there was basically nothing about the site that worked at any time.
The dev team (whoever they are) had no experience working on EVM chains and seemed to not really care about figuring this stuff out. The indexer was buggy for the product’s entire lifespan, and they seemed unwilling to fix even the simplest things. Hardcoding royalty payout addresses, ignoring the mobile website, and completely failing to index the Chikn collection are the standouts that I can remember. Oh yeah, and with the Dokyo mint you could only mint 1 at a time at first? Something like that. Remarkable technology indeed.
Who was Hyperspace?
In the end, I think most of the hate for Hyperspace was because people found the team unlikeable. On top of clearly trying to maximize profits at the expense of the user experience (they don’t need a good UX when everyone is funneled through their product anyway), it seemed like every decision they made had little to no thought put into it. The rules for the incentive program were constantly being reworked, often midseason, and it was hard to get any real info out of them about future plans. Special shoutout to seasons 1 and 4 where most people lost money due to last minute rule and prizepool changes.
The team was the epitome of everything that people don’t like about VC/Tech/Crypto bros. Here is the founder’s website in all its glory. I encourage you to really dig into it and examine each section—there’s a lot to like here:
It was obvious pretty early on that the team was here for a max extraction and that’s where the hate really comes from. Ava Labs paid people to use their platform, and in return Hyperspace squeezed every ounce of profit they could from these incentivized users. They used a premade NFT contract for all their launches, they had platform royalties set to 2% while projects only got .5%, ignored reported wash trading because it was pumping their volume—the list goes on and on.
Where is Hyperspace now?
In true extracting, serial-entrepreneur form, Hyperspace has shut down! Not just on AVAX, but as far as I can tell the NFT platform no longer exists on any chain. The team has milked that cow for all its worth.
They have since repurposed their Hyperspace twitter accounts for their next project. Something about predicting the success of early stage startups? I don’t really want to give it attention, and I probably would have never even known about it if I didn’t find old DMs between me and Hyperspace accounts that have now been re-named. As far as I can tell there is no Hyperspace twitter account left. Congrats on the successful extraction! I’m sure this next venture has some real substance to it and is not just a play to raise a bunch of money and then shutdown a year later.
Wow! I did not mean to make this article as spiteful as it turned out. There’s nothing inherently bad about people trying to make money (that’s what crypto is about after all), I think the sheer negligence from a UX standpoint is what really pushed most of the AVAX community over the edge. Usually people will at least pretend to care about the users, but they really had no incentive to because we couldn’t go anywhere else. It was an effective use of their monopoly, so props to them.
Also there’s a lot more to cover here on the NFT launchpad side—Dokyo and Nekopolis being some standouts—but something something always leave the people wanting more. We’ll have plenty of time for that later.
Pasta of the Week (Historically speaking)
GGs