Looty postmortem, extra content

The bits and bobs that didn't fit in elsewhere

Part of the process for writing these articles involves discarding a lot of thoughts or content that just didn’t fit into the pacing properly. I’m not going to even make an effort to do that here, will just brain dump some stuff that didn’t make it in.

Hiring developers

I’ve only ever hired people at my day job, and a lot of the heavy lifting there is done by HR, and the applicants literally come to us without any effort to proactively find them.

I’m sure it’s much harder to find developers for a web3 project. It’s probably even harder to find the top talent; the best ones are going to be busy already.

Even if you find a developer, it’s likely to be very difficult to evaluate their quality, particularly if you are a non-technical founder. I feel like we really saw this in action with Looty.

But honestly, I have no idea why they keep believing what the people causing problems were saying over what the people reporting problems were saying. That’s on them.

Responding to FUD

Sometimes when you’re running a project, people will say bad things about it. Or they will tell you your code is vulnerable, and maybe your dev is telling you it is not.

I get that people have an emotional connection to their work, and that the immediate gut response, especially to anonymous strangers, is to be defensive or attack back. And maybe some of that is necessary, you can’t just let people walk all over you.

But FUD isn’t illegitimate by definition. Sometimes criticism is valid. If you push back against people giving legitimate criticism, or try to silence them, it’s a very bad look. And in some cases, it can result in a very bad outcome.

I’ll admit that it is probably much easier for me to say “you should evaluate all the FUD and objectively determine what you can learn from it” than it is to actually do it.

Avalabs support for projects

They provide a lot of support for projects in this space, including money, advice, and promotion. People tend to gloss over the successes and focus on the failures. Or they don’t even hear about the support because it’s all taking place behind the scenes.

I think this makes sense. It’s not their job to pick winners and losers, it’s their job to make sure people have the support they need to grow and succeed.

More recently though, this support has been more visible than in the past. Hyperspace and Dokyo are the prime examples of that. And there have been successes and failures there, which makes sense. No one gets everything right on the first try, no one never makes any mistakes. But hey, at least HS didn’t get their rewards drained, so they’re doing pretty good by that metric.

This whole Looty thing has become quite the clusterfuck, but that’s OK, in my opinion. Do we really want them quietly puppeting these projects behind the scenes to ensure success? My understanding is that they’re mostly hands off, offering at most consulting or connections. And I think that’s the right way to run it.

The HS, meme coin, and Looty things may have had their issues, and lord knows I’ve personally criticized the execution myself quite a bit. But I give them a lot of credit for trying, people in the peanut gallery don’t understand how hard this stuff can be.

The importance of trust in a trustless space

This one always makes me laugh. We’re operating in a space where people can be (at least) pesudo-anonymous, and force each other to take actions agreed to by code.

But the way we act is the way people have always acted. You know how many times I’ve seen someone in Discord say “Hey can someone send me 10K on Solana, I’ll transfer you back on Avax later”. And someone’s like “Sure post the address”.

I have had people literally give me private keys with 200K worth of assets on them so I could take some action on their behalf. I share access to EOAs that have a significant amount of funds on them with several other people.

Basically what I’m saying is that trust, and I guess goodwill, are extremely valuable currencies in web3 (paradoxically). You should take care to foster those relationships, because once burned, they rarely recover.

And even if you’re actually secretly a terrible person and asshole, it’s in your best interests to behave like a good person, because in the end that will lead to the most profitable outcome for everyone.

The end

OK this is really the end, no more articles in this series. Hope you had fun.