Avax Drama! Part Deux
Just deux it
Time for the regularly scheduled terrible dad joke that dates me by referencing a movie produced before most of you were born.
This is my second post on AVAX drama. It’s got layers because I’ll be talking about the infamous French Devs and I put ‘deux’ in the title. It has one layer.
If you’re not familiar with the ‘French Devs’ meme, it became a running gag during the 2021 mini bull run that any projects with French devs would inevitably rug. This post happens to discuss a project by French devs.
Disclaimer: I am a team member of Ferdy Flip, a ‘competitor’ to BonesBet and the lawful (on the run) CEO of Organisation Autonome Décentralisée de la Haine Cynique.
Why am I doing this
Probably because a little drama in the bear keeps the blood flowing. Anyway, it started as an innocuous comment in response to FerdyFlip’s new Roulette game.
As things do when we (AVAX CT) have nothing better to do, it escalates.
And escalated and escalated and escalated. If it tickles your pickle you can read the whole thread here.
Who are BonesBet
BonesBet is an Avax on-chain casino that currently offers a Social Roulette game. You can read more about their project on GitBook here.
They originally launched an NFT called ‘Tiny Bones’, 6666 pieces at 2 AVAX when AVAX was priced at $55. I tried to track down more info but their linktree seems broken. And their Medium post announcing their project has been taken down.
Anyway, I’m told they wanted to launch a metaverse or something.
But their metaverse page seems mostly nonfunctional and abandoned. They decided to pivot to gambling I guess, a year later. They launched approximately in early April.
Who are FerdyFlip / FerdyFish
The Ferdy Fish NFT was originally launched by some relatively unknown devs, and abandoned. It was picked up in December 2022 by momind and discoinfernos, who created a community around it based on memes.
In March 2023, VirtualQuery and Smitty released FerdyFlip, a coinflip gambling game themed around Ferdy Fish that paid 1% of all bets to Ferdy Fish NFT holders.
Since then, FerdyFlip has expanded the team to three (yours truly) and added support for a number of games, most recently Roulette.
So why the beef?
I think a bit of tension is to be expected when two groups are competing in the same space (on-chain gambling), and even more when one group releases a similar feature.
In this case, BonesBet has leaned into the social aspect of the game, which I think is a pretty cool and interesting feature. They have a simplified experience, with only red/black/green bet options.
FerdyFlip has opted for a more complex experience with the full range of 10 different bet types (number, color, parity, thirds, halves, rows, columns, split up, split across, corners) but single player only.
Neither of these projects are unique; there are many on-chain gambling projects, and many roulette games in many casinos.
My personal feelings
Although they did an interesting thing with the social aspect of their game, that’s basically it. The game itself is a pretty mediocre implementation. It’s been out for months with no changes.
They hyped their launch for an entire month, and then they fumbled it. Not only did they push back their launch repeatedly, after they announced it, the game immediately broke. The complete lack of testing is incredible.
Issues with their roulette game aside… what the hell were they doing all this time? They minted in October 2021? Failed their metaverse project in mid 2022? Finally launched a single on-chain game in 2023?
To give you some context, the team that built Ferdy Flip is 3 part-time developers. And since just the start of the year we’ve built Avalytics, Raffllrr, and 9 casino games for Ferdy Flip. Roulette took us less than two weeks to design, implement, and test, just working an hour or two a day here and there.
I think it’s fair to ask “What were you doing all this time????”
Expectations for devs
As of the recent Azuki mint, people are finally starting to come to terms with the fact that NFT mints are not equity in a project. But if you take a huge sum of money from people, and make specific promises that induce them to give you money, you have some responsibility to deliver.
You might fail, sure. But you have to try. And if you fail, you have to own it.
Building a metaverse was always a stupid idea. Sorry. It shouldn’t take a year to figure that out. When you pivot, it shouldn’t take another half a year to build a social roulette game.
After failing for all that time, and taking so very long to do it, you’d have to have some kind of insane confidence to bullpost like this:
What really ticked me off
A while back, someone (probably that fucking Goose guy) was going through the NFT mints from the last bull and noting how much they made vs what they produced. And I noticed Tiny Bones on there with an estimated $750K for a ‘metaverse’.
And this annoyed me. Because how stupid am I to be working this hard in the bear when I could have literally done anything in the bull and made $750K. I forgot about it until I noticed AltLoot’s entry into the ongoing drama.
Their response to this very fair criticism? Lie, and escalate.
There I go, channeling my inner ChefGoose again
I guess the thing that pushed me over the edge was the implication that we are, for some reason, wash trading Ferdy Fish.
Feel free to look and try to find some wash trading. I can guarantee you that none of us are wasting money on that. Blockchain is public, let me know what you find.
Probably best not to lie about things that are easily disprovable via block explorers. They claim that only 50% minted out and 50% was OTC’d, fortunately I have access to a really nice database of every NFT transaction on AVAX, courtesy of Avalytics.
I know math is hard so I’ll do it for you.
Public mint income: (6666 - 1390) * 2A * $55 per AVAX = $580,360
1390 NFTs OTC to Blackpool Finance. I found this post detailing the transaction for 20,812 BPT, worth approximately $227K at the time.
Side note; no mention of Tiny Bones on their site since March 2022, not listed in their portfolio. Written off?
Found this transaction with the incoming payment, and the split to the other dev. So it looks like AltLoot was wrong, they raised $807K, not $750K. Bad AltLoot.
So what happened to the mint funds?
Well, this is where it gets a bit tricky. Clearly they treated this money like it was their personal funds and not a project treasury, since they transferred it directly into their personal hot wallets which have thousands of transactions.
Here’s s0wcy and here’s 0xADB. And what's been going on with their funds? Well, here are the relevant TX from two years ago (mint time).
From s0wcy to 0xADB:
From 0xADB to s0wcy:
So on the net, s0wcy sent 0xADB 4.3K avax and 10K BPT, or approximately $386K USD. Which looks like half the total proceeds from the mint, with some rounding errors or maybe they paid an artist / infrastructure, who knows. s0wcy clearly retained the other half.
What happened to the money? Well kudos to 0xADB for immediately dumping everything and avoiding the -90% that most coins went through during the bear:
Well, not everything. Big fumble on the BPT, held it, then staked it until it was nearly worthless:
How about s0wcy? Looks like he swapped a chunk into eth, and then had some fun farming Benqi/TJ via YieldYak:
A bagholder after my own heart. We’re all just AVAX community members, after all.
Is there a lesson in all this?
Yes. If you’ve done stupid things and left a trail other people can follow, shut the fuck up about it.
Stop acting like victims and just own your mistakes.
There’s literally no way to hold people accountable in this space, but any time someone who has obviously scammed an enormous amount of money is criticized for it, they immediately claim ‘the community is toxic’, ‘stop being rude’, ‘mind your own business’.
Kindly fuck off.