Update / Recap / Post-Mortem
Peace Riders!
In this letter the Avalanche Riders team wants to address everyone in the Riders Gang about what had happened to our project (especially during the past months) and what is going to happen next. We have been offline for quite a long time, discussing how we proceed, and we feel that we owe everyone in the Riders gang an explanation about what is going on.
So here we go:
We will start from the very beginning, explaining what our vision for Avalanche Riders was and how we tried to achieve this. We then explain what happened in the past few months, why there suddenly was no more activity on both our Discord and our Twitter and how this had affected the future of the project. We will conclude with how we have in mind to deal with this problem.
The Avalanche Riders project was founded by me (Jay) and was soon joined by two close friends (Discord usernames avAlain and Piri_Piri_Piri) with the vision to create a game that integrates NFT technology much more than previously seen on the market. Our initial months went better than we could have ever imagined, and strongly motivated us to continue building and to go big: We wrote a very long and detailled whitepaper, created a website, set up our own Discord server, Builders Portal, you name it. Then we launched the «Help, Earn, Win!» web app to boost our marketing, and this is were things went south. In a few days our Twitter account gained more than 3'000 followers (~ 600% increase) and our Discord more than 2'000 members (~ 2000% increase). This led us to believe that a significant amount of new people joined the Riders gang. We were aware of the fact that a lot of these accounts could be bots or fake, but we still believed that there was a non-negligible amount of new users. Based on this, we have put even more effort into the project, drafted our Tokenomics, ran contests and did everything we could to boost the roadmap.
Then, our initial streak rapidly came to an end. When only five people joined our Twitter space, and we saw that our online activity stats were significantly lower than what we could have expected from the follower count on our Twitter or the member count on our Discord, we came to realize that we were much worse off than initially thought. What more elaborate projects would do in such a situation is to put a lot of money into marketing and development so that they can show to the community that the project actually has a future and shouldn’t be forgotten. However, we simply had no money. Our initial fundraising from the Genesis sales rapidly diminished due to expenses for marketing, design, web dev and last but not least the massive amount of value wiped from the markets in the 2022 crash. We always saw ourselves as a group of ambitious grad and undergrad students who thought that with enough work put into a project one could compensate for the missing financial means. Private money wasn’t an option since, as students, we don’t have any income and on private saving accounts there neither was a lot of money around to put into this project. This is why we have been working seven days a week, up to 16 hours a day, thinking it would be enough to realize such a monster we had in mind. To our surprise, it wasn’t as easy as that.
When July came to an end, and our last «HEW Monthly Contest» was over, we felt like having lost 90% of the activity we once had. People weren’t interested any more in the Riders project, and our roadmap started to lag behind. This was also the time when yearly exams hit, and our working days got even longer. Initially we thought that missing an entire summer was worth it, as we saw our community enjoying the things we have built. But when we came to realize that most numbers and beliefs we had were wrong, it really started hitting us. (Including burnout symptoms and the «nice» things accompanying them.)
During this period we tried to find volunteers who share our vision and could help us in realizing the project. We definitely had found some of them — e.g. our Discord mods who we really want to thank for the effort they have put into our project — however on the side of development and marketing we had to get along on ourselves. The task of fulfilling our roadmap in an appropriate time started to seem more impossible day by day, and combined with the fact that there weren’t a lot of Riders left who really were interested in our efforts (our website stats showed an average of around one visitor per two days), we unfortunately and with extreme sadness had to decide that it simply wasn’t worth the time anymore.
Now you naturally might ask: «Is this a rug pull?». This is entirely left for you to decide, and whether you can comprehend our decision or you think it’s fraud: this is your fair opinion and we can — and must— understand it. However, we’d like to tell you this: Until the very last second before quitting we wanted to see our visions being realized. We never had in mind to rug-pull, and we still don’t. From the initial 63 AVAX we raised from the Genesis sales, we have transferred around 16.5 AVAX for marketing and dev, 6.5 AVAX as part of the «HEW Monthly Contests» and have split a small part of around 3 AVAX within the team. We now have a remaining balance of 37 AVAX, still from the Genesis sales. Our idea now was this: We definitely can’t pay back everyone their initial investments, but we tried to find the best and fairest solution possible, which in our eyes is the following:
There were 100 Genesis NFTs sold, so the maximum amount we can pay back any hodler is (37/100) AVAX = 0.37 AVAX / NFT. If you still own a Genesis Rider and you’d like to get your investments back (or at least the part we can still afford to pay back), please write us an e-mail at avaxriders@gmail.com, with the number of Riders you own and the wallet address where these Riders are located in. If we can match the number of Riders to this wallet, we will transfer you an amount back according to [Your number of Riders owned] x 0.37 AVAX. We know that this is by far no satisfactory solution for everyone, but we still wanted to give our Riders back what we can, without you our project couldn’t even have started!
Yet, sadly, this is the end of our steep up-and-down. We will wait for 14 more days, and on the 16th of November 2022 at 6PM UTC we eventually will put offline all of our online presence, including our Discord, our Twitter and our website. This also is going to be the time when we make all the payback transfers, so please don’t get impatient if you don’t receive your AVAX before this day.
With this all said, we’d once more like to thank each and everyone of the Riders gang for their continuous support, and we also want to sincerely apologize for the things that went wrong. As with a lot of NFT projects, we were no professionals but rather an ambitious group of amateurs who wanted to create something big, and got hit by the hard-yet-fair reality of open markets. It was an amazing time and experience and we got to know a lot of awesome people from all over the planet. In the name of the Avalanche Riders team we wish you all the best for the future and hope that you still made some significant gains with other NFT projects or crypto investments!
If you have any questions, remarks, etc. of course feel free to contact us or write into the comments! Please note that after the 16th of November, we will not be able to receive any more e-mails or DMs, so please make sure to contact us before that day.
Best regards,
the Avalanche Riders Team.
