Kenny

[Paps🔺 @Paps0x]

Alright, time to say what needs to be said.

Disclaimer:

I’m not here looking for drama, even though saying this out loud might naturally create some. My goal is to bring a bit of transparency and let people know about certain actions coming from folks at AvaLabs. Some of these things are already well-known, so a few of you won’t learn anything new. Other parts are more in the “rumor that never got fully confirmed” category. In the thread below, I’m not dropping hard evidence. What I’m sharing comes from multiple conversations I’ve had, testimonies, and on-chain investigations done by members of the AVAX community. I won’t speak on their behalf. If any of them want to reveal their identities and share the proofs they showed me after this tweet goes out, I’d welcome it. The goal here isn’t to hold a trial. None of this is personal. I’m doing this for the good of $AVAX and to give its community the fairness it deserves, a community that’s often been accused of “not being bullish enough” or “killing the vibe.” I’ve contributed to that narrative myself, thinking it was more helpful to just bullpost instead of pointing out what was wrong. Lately, I started speaking about it privately, then in TG groups. Now I’m doing it publicly, hoping others will also speak up, not in some chaotic crash-out frenzy, but so the space can finally get cleaned up.

Alright, let’s get into it.

Let’s go back to 2023. At that time, not much was happening on-chain. It was the bear. But suddenly, AVAX started gaining attention again.
For me, the real shift happened in December 2023, the moment AVAX/SOL hit a local ATH, same for AVAX/BTC. Thousands of users were flocking in, everything looked aligned, and the future felt incredibly bright for AVAX.
Top-tier global banking partnerships, memes exploding, a full NFT season. Everything pointed upward. So how did we go from a chain solidly in the Top 10, with strong on-chain volume and a real chance to stand alongside Solana or BSC, to what we see today?
That's the question we’re going to try to answer. And to do that, we need to start with the foundation of any serious company: its strategic vision.

Chapter 1: The Vision That Never Was

Back in 2022, Emin Gün Sirer, CEO and co-founder of AVAX, openly said meme coins were stupid and useless.
By December 2023, suddenly memes became the hot thing for AVAX to push.
There was even a time when AvaLabs’ official policy was literally:
“We never talk about memes on Twitter.”
Then out of nowhere, you had Luigi shilling COQ and TECH, with other Foundation board members piling on right behind him.If we step back for a second: from a communication standpoint, this sequence was a glaring mistake. You simply can’t say one thing and then do the exact opposite a year later without any explanation. A brand needs consistency. A chain narrative needs a direction.
We’ll come back later to how this “meme rush” was launched and executed, because that part matters too.The truth is: AVAX went through six or seven different narratives in two years, each one contradicting or replacing the previous without any long-term logic.
Meanwhile, competing chains stuck to coherent storytelling that actually aligned with what was happening on-chain.
Solana, for example, embraced being the “casino chain,” the home of meme coins, and it worked. They stayed consistent, and the market rewarded them.AVAX, on the other hand, tried to be:
the gaming chain
then the NFT chain
then the meme chain
then the institutional chain
then the AI agents chain
then the social-fi chain
then the DeFi chain
then the DATs chainIt became a rotating identity crisis.
Another recurring issue: these narratives were often copy-pasted from what other chains were already doing, but always late to the party.
For example, the AI agent narrative hit AVAX months after it had peaked on Base. It felt out of sync, forced, disconnected from on-chain reality.Most of these narratives didn’t emerge organically from the community or from what was actually happening on AVAX.
They were top-down pushes from AvaLabs’ communication team.
And too often, the projects chosen to embody these narratives were not community-driven or rooted in AVAX’s existing ecosystem.

Chapter 2: The Forgotten Builders

By constantly switching narratives, AvaLabs became out of touch with the community (its needs, its expectations, and its loyal builders). While other chains executed marketing strategies that brought in users and market share, AVAX never expanded beyond its late 2023 peak.Some “inner-circle” projects and influencers got attention, but real community-driven projects were often ignored. Take $HUSKY as an example. At the end of 2023, we ran a major campaign while AVAX Twitter reach was almost dead. Metrics? In late October, our tweets got 13 likes (under 200 views). By early December, one post hit 1k likes and 50,000 views. All done organically, with zero support from AvaLabs. @luigidemeo once said, “I like Husky but it’s Coq time.” Coq is a legendary meme (no problem there), but ignoring the project that opened the door for the rest shows a blatant lack of respect. We onboarded hundreds of users, reaching 15K holders organically by late December. $HUSKY continued collaborating with other projects and participating in events. And the reward? Largely ignored during the meme rush.
Other projects with strong communities and real traction were also overlooked. $VELAI and $CWAI had genuine communities and functional projects. $RIP was one of the first Arena tokens, supported by hundreds. I can name dozens of projects that deserved way more love from Ava Labs and the Foundation.
The question is obvious. On what basis does AvaLabs choose which projects to support? Certainly not on real data (user numbers, Twitter reach, or growth potential).

Chapter 3: The Golden Pass

On what basis does AvaLabs or the Foundation decide which projects to support? Which partnerships or contracts are prioritized?Take Hyperspace as an example. AvaLabs launched an incentive program that allowed Hyperspace to generate millions of dollars in fees, all paid by Avalanche through incentives that often benefited wash traders. The cost for Hyperspace? Nothing. Yet at the same time, Hyperspace continued to charge $10,000 for launching a new collection. Few new collections were launched, discouraging artists and builders from bringing projects to AVAX.
It feels like decisions like these favor AvaLabs insiders and their friends, rather than projects based on real community engagement or contributions to AVAX’s ecosystem. Did Dominic Carbonaro, who oversaw the Hyperspace deal, ever consider requiring Hyperspace, in exchange for millions of dollars in funding, to prioritize community-driven projects? Apparently not.
Another example is AI9000, heavily promoted by Luigi, who openly bought hundreds of AVAX tokens before the Foundation followed with their own purchases. On what basis was AI9000 chosen as the flagship AI agent project for AVAX, while other fully functional projects like $CWAI and the @0xVelvetai trading agent received only minimal support? These projects were active, with real communities. Their Telegram channels were alive, with dozens of people interacting daily.
The broader pattern is clear. Projects with actual traction and engaged communities are often overlooked, while a few get a golden pass, seemingly because of personal connections rather than measurable impact on the ecosystem.

Chapter 4: The Blind Trader

Avalanche tried to support its ecosystem, but it was chaotic and amateurish.The meme rush was announced in advance. This was a huge mistake. You create a moral hazard. Wallets were tracked in real time. Coq, Kimbo, and Tech hit ATHs while Foundation buys were happening. When the rush ended, the community was asked to lock tokens for tiny rewards, which did not cover the brutal losses. Meanwhile, Solana’s memes were breaking billion-dollar market caps.The presale season was worse. Hundreds of millions were spent on a few meme coins with zero market making. There was no coordination with projects, no alignment with roadmaps, no timing with market candles. Random buys of hundreds of thousands of dollars destroyed token price trajectories.
Take KET, WINK, and BLUB. The Foundation spent roughly 6M AVAX on KET, 1.2M AVAX on WINK, and 376K AVAX on BLUB. Thousands of users bridged to participate in these presales, yet today some of these tokens are worth less than 1M dollars in market cap.
BLUB in particular created a wave of excitement unseen on AVAX for over a year. It became a cultural moment, a shared memory in the community. Abandoning it was a mistake. It did not deserve to be sidelined, and this shows a lack of understanding from AvaLabs of what resonates with the ecosystem. The Foundation’s 5M dollar purchase at the top, on the same day Trump announced a trade war, wiped out gains and turned the hype into losses. This is a perfect example of market timing gone wrong.
This was not just sloppy execution. It was blind trading with hundreds of millions at stake, putting the broader AVAX community at risk.

Chapter 5: Insider Profits

While the Foundation executed the meme rush and presales in a chaotic, uncoordinated way, some insiders quietly benefited.Take Arena tokens as an example. Systematic extraction happened across multiple tokens. On KET, massive extraction occurred from the very beginning. Most AvaLabs employees appeared on the KET shameboard early on, and some even asked to be removed. The extraction was not limited to presales; it also happened during the meme rush.
$TECH is another example. Despite being less than four days old and not meeting the Foundation’s criteria for the meme rush, insiders managed to buy a large portion of the supply within the first minute of the launch and sell immediately after Foundation purchases. It is clear that some members of the Foundation either leaked their intentions or personally profited from these operations.
Certain wallets consistently profited from Foundation buy activity, often minutes ahead of official purchases. This included members of the board who mysteriously resigned shortly after a 5M dollar market buy at the top of Blub (exit pump for them?). While the broader AVAX community participated in presales, endured brutal price swings, and chased hype, a few insiders were consistently ahead, systematically extracting millions of dollars.
This was not just sloppy execution. It was a system where millions were funneled to a few wallets, exploiting the chaotic strategy, publicized buys, and lack of transparency. The community bore the risk, while insiders profited.

Chapter 6: The Black Box

All of this happened with a screaming lack of transparency. On one side the Foundation wants to be transparent by announcing the meme rush. On the other, we still don’t have any real governance on the blockchain. We don’t know who owns the huge validator nodes that rake in massive staking profits every single day and are technically able to control the blockchain because of the protocol. I believe staking revenue alone can explain the vertiginous drop in the price of AVAX, especially when you see how tens of millions of AVAX were spent by the Foundation over the last two years (we’re talking the equivalent of two Avalanche Rush programs spent). And I’m not even talking about the millions of AVAX that flow to CEXs, the OTC sales that always seem to surface at every local top. There are way too many coincidences. That said, I still don’t have formal proof that the Foundation or AvaLabs are selling tokens on CEXs. If someone has that proof, bring it.

Chapter 7: Why This Actually Matters

Why does all of this matter? We need to clean house, and the cleaning has to come from the bottom, from the community. Everything we built at the AVAX community level has literally been destroyed. We’ve been pointed at for far too long, but the truth is that the Foundation and AvaLabs created the toxic behaviors in the community themselves. When you publicly back one project over another, how do you expect people to behave any differently than just chasing your approval? When we see Foundation transactions that pump one token hard and abandon another? When we can all spot the insider wallets? The result is a community that got dropped while a few of us made it out by following the money and extracting everything possible from the Foundation. Result: retail left. Because NO ONE at AvaLabs ever cared.
I fully realized how out-of-touch this company is last June when $VANYA launched. It was an excellent idea, perfectly launched by the $COQ team with market-making, volume, everything set up to succeed. Sending 2 % of the supply to an AvaLabs employee was the fatal mistake. She dumped the entire bag in one shot because she was supposedly drunk. Imagine a Solana employee doing the same thing. It probably wouldn’t happen because over there they understand the power of CT, they know why you get sent 2 %, and they know the bare minimum is to burn what was sent. The fact that every single AvaLabs employee jumped to defend Vanya is symptomatic of the total lack of DeFi culture inside that company today. Basically we have noobs running the blockchain who know nothing. They don’t know how to manage a community.

Oh wait, we did have one guy who actually knew about the space… and they fired him yesterday.

I had more to say, but its enough for today.

[Clown Wars Down Under 🤡 @clowndownunder]

Immigration in Australia

[Emin Gün Sirer🔺⚔️ @el33th4xor]

The event yesterday in DC was a watershed moment. At some point, I found myself at a crypto party, with people expressing relief that crypto talent no longer need to flee the country, that crypto people no longer need to worry about getting debanked, and that crypto projects need no longer fear capricious regulators. The crowd literally broke down into chanting "USA USA."

But before we get too jubilant, there are two major takeaways, or new responsibilities, for us.

First, we need to self-police better. The flipside of lighter regulation is that the space needs to guard itself against scammers, ponzi operators, fraudsters and the like. Please don't fall for people who are LARPing as brilliant traders just because they have messy hair and an inability to tie their shoes, as researchers just because they have a jacket with elbow patches, or as generally being successful because they are repurposing your money. Always ask "what has this person brought into this space?" If you can't name some technical accomplishments, well then, it's on us to cleave these cancers.

Second, it is time to deliver. The days when one can constantly hold shiny technical gobbledygook in front of the masses are over. ZKSLURPs aren't going to allow a chain to scale, any more than VDFs, VRFs, RCAs, SNARKs, STARKs, or ZKEVMs or other acronym soup. It's time for teams to deliver working products. Beware of unfalsifiable claims, such as "it's the banking chain" or "ZKSLURPs failed but ZKSPLURGEs will finally allow us to scale." Look for teams that are helping grow the pie.

I just got back to NYC from DC and I couldn't be more bullish. It's our do-or-die moment as a nascent industry, and I'm confident we will show the world how much better society will be when applications are built on blockchain rails.

[Anthony Pompliano 🌪 @APompliano]

My message to all the bitcoiners who held bitcoin through the ups and downs.

Congratulations on $100,000!