This is a report answering everyone’s questions, reporting on everything we’ve achieved, all the obstacles we faced, all the barriers currently preventing our growth, strategic decisions that were taken thus far for growth, and highlighting the critical moments in the lifetime of the project. This report includes coverage from September 2021 to June 2022 and provides a clear picture of where we are now and how we can progress.
Avian Network is a proof-of-work secured blockchain designed for efficient and interoperable asset management. The network prioritizes usability, automation, and low fees to make NFT minting and management simple, affordable, and secure. The network’s economy runs on AVN, our native coin that can be mined on a dual algorithm setup using either GPUs or CPUs, providing more decentralization and accessibility to the network.
If you’d like to take a closer look at our vision, here’s a link to our whitepaper: https://avn.network/whitepaper/
2021 timeline
September - Public launch as a GPU mining coin on X16R algo + release of website v1 developed using WordPress - Listing on 1st exchange, Exbitron - Early stages of switching the GPU algorithm to X16RT and adding the second algorithm for CPU (MintourX)
October - Listing on TradeOgre - Late October, the previous project leader (Mr.S) dissolved all socials, hijacked the foundation wallet, and shut down the v1 website. The remaining members rebuilt all socials, and a new team, and brought the site back online. We started a new foundation wallet with a $0 balance
November - Ravencoin Lite was rebranded to Avian Network; we conducted months of research and surveys before settling on a new name, logo, and various brand touchpoint - Development of Avian algorithm switch from X16R to X16RT and added a CPU algo (MinotaurX) for more accessibility - WRVL was released on Polygon
December - Rebranding of WRVL to WAVN with a better contract and migrating all tokens - Launch of wallet 3.0 - Release of new GPU algorithm (X16R -> X16RT) + CPU (minotaur-X). Post algorithm change; there was faulty difficulty on launch which led to over-minting and super short-term inflation due to the excess of blocks being mined.
2022 timeline
January - Launch of wallet 3.1 - Early development of wallet 4.0 - Work on Avian Whitepaper by Tsunami
February - Whitepaper release - Listing on Coingecko and other data aggregators - Early development of Avian Flight Plans by Furious - Furious (Core wallet developer) became less active due to IRL, which impacted the development of wallet 4.0
March - 1st AMA with limited POAP NFT airdrop (200) - Started fundraising for exchange listings and website migration - Early-stage of development of the mobile wallet by Reflow - Late March, Public test net of wallet 4.0
April - Early development of website 2.0 - Craig took hands of the development of wallet 4.0 to correct all bugs found with public testnet - Early development of the DEX by Peer and Ayonull
May - Tsunami and Arkantik working on website development - Craig working on wallet 4.0 GUI development and bug fixes
Questions:
How did Ravencoin Classic become Lite and then Avian?
Ravencoin Classic was a fork of Ravencoin which was primarily overrun by ASICs, shortly after its launch it was abandoned by its developers. The initial founding core team of Ravencoin Lite was assembled to right the wrongs done by RVC. Today we’ve rebranded and stand as Avain Network, something different, a vision and mission that is very different from that of RVC or RVL, we stand on our own foundation. We have developed the vision into something more impactful and game-changing. We have given RVC and RVL users an ecosystem that is not only more developed in visuals and communication but is far superior to its predecessors due to the further development of decentralized mining solutions and ecosystem tools that were not present like Avian on Polygon Matic, the browser extension, donation portal, and successful NFT mining on test net.
What are the hurdles we came across and how did we overcome them?
Back in the early stage of RVL (RavencoinLite), the network was mainly flooded with ASICs which was making the GPU mining quite unfair. That’s why we came up with the thought of making the coin a dual algorithm mining coin, that way the new GPU algorithm would temporarily circumvent the ASICs on the network but also allow a fair share between CPU and GPU miners.
At some point, few users saw their coins disappear from their wallets. Being a new coin we got suspected of having a malicious file in our wallet, soon after people also realized that other coins like Ravencoin, Bitcoin, etc.. were being drained out of their wallets. In reality, it was another project called SHEETCOIN that had the malicious file in their qt wallet, looking for wallet.dat files on the computer it was installed on. Even if we were not responsible for those losses, RVL got stained by this.
Mr. S, the previous project manager had nuked the project, putting us in a tough situation. Discord, Twitter, and Reddit were dissolved. The website was taken off the servers and the GitHub was deleted. Luckily we had a backup of the v1 site which we were able to move to new servers. We relaunched socials and started from scratch. Mr. S also hijacked the foundation wallet which mostly consisted of donations through mining pools; approximately 250,000 AVN was in that wallet worth upwards of $250 at the time of the attack.
Being a fork of Ravencoin meant having some similar aspects of their project like the core wallet, white paper, and algo which was basic and a cookie-cutter. Along with ASIC mining suspicions, it created a negative brand perception. Mr. S did not help the process as we were considered a ‘rug pull’ at the time, which was not accurate whatsoever. This took months of work and research to strategically launch the current brand to completely eliminate the FUD that existed at the time.
Besides mending the brand perception we had to address the ASICs that existed on the network as that was not a part of the vision. As to contrary belief, the core team had no part in this exploit, and Even when they were accused of negligence we were intensely discussing alternatives in the background. We quickly came to a conclusion on what algorithms to substitute to eliminate that excessive hashrate to allow more fairness for GPU miners. Along the way, we decided to one-up ourselves and introduced a send algorithm solely for CPU miners to increase accessibility and fairness to give more decentralization to a network that was not decentralized enough before the algo swap. We wanted to make things right for the community. Believe it or not, CPU mining has seen the highest influx of hashrate over the past few months and that move was a definite success.
During the algo swap and MinotaurX addition, there were excess blocks being mined which led to over-minting and short-term inflation. The team acted quickly and within 48 hours we made changes to correct the difficulty. Sadly in that process, the fix acted in the opposite direction and made the difficulty ramp up exponentially, the chain had to be paused for a few days to take a deeper look at the issue and assess it the proper way. During this process, an excess of a few million AVN was minted and a rollback was necessary.
Where were we in September and where are we now?
We simply started as a raw copy of RVC including wallet, whitepaper, and algorithm. Now we have a dedicated white paper built around the goals of AVN, a new website is being worked on adapted to the Avian brand, and a wallet built for the needs of Avian, is no longer a basic qt wallet.
Around 20 team members were included in September, 35 team members in November after the remake of the core team, and around 20 team members today with 8 weekly active members.
What have we built so far, and what do we want to build?
What have we achieved so far:
We saw the risk of ASICs in the network and decided to change to a safer GPU algorithm called X16RT and increased accessibility by adding a CPU algorithm called MinotaurX. This dual mining option is one of the few if not the only dual mining coin available at the moment.
We conducted a full rebrand including visual touchpoints and brand messaging
We got listed on 2 exchanges, Exbitron and Tradeogre, and reached a high volume of 44.5m AVN in mid-December, and we had an ATH market cap creeping towards $10m
Wrapping and cross-chain functionality were added to Polygon with liquidity on Sushi Swap
The white paper was strategized, developed, designed, and published with a renewed vision
We started fundraising and made it easier to do so by developing a donation portal that gave you access to all chains using Metamask
The full website was migrated to EditorX and development is ongoing (80% complete)
Where we want to be in the next few months:
Complete the website development and launch with a merch store, blog, AMA directory, open core team position listings, and application.
Complete the development of critical ecosystem tools like automated wrapping and unwrapping and enabling assets in the core wallet to enable some real game-changing utility
Complete secondary development projects to develop the ecosystem to be more functional and accessible. Most of these projects have already been initiated but not completed like the Avian browser extension, decentralized exchange, and the Avian mobile application
Then to complete tertiary development projects which haven’t been initiated like the Avian DAO and nodes
What obstacles are preventing these milestones from being reached?
Elevated inactivity of core team members due to IRL circumstances, which is holding us back from pushing important aspects of development, marketing, and communication. We went from 30+ core team members (75% activity) to currently 20+ core members (40% activity)
Excessive project initiations that were not able see-through, some ongoing development is more critical than others but we’ve cut ourselves thin by spreading the limited manhours across multiple projects which have lower priority than others. For example; Automated wrapping and unwrapping are critical to providing an efficient on and off-ramp between chains. Further development of the core wallet as it’s the hub of the network’s resources. Projects need to not only be prioritized but require more skill and man-hours to complete.
Inability to deliver information to multiple social channels consistently due to shortage of time and focus on developing the ecosystem and its tools, the marketing and PR team is the shorthanded and working cross-department to make the needle move and are unable to focus on their areas of expertise.
The project started as a community project and saw tremendous output from there initially, but there has been an overwhelming dependence on the core team to solely fulfill our goals in the roadmap. While this is not a flawed perspective, 50% of the core team are quite young and volunteer for the experience or on the side. This means that 50% of the core team is not as consistent or reliable as the other half. This puts growth constraints on the network as we look to grow across borders and partner with other brands, we don’t have the professional visibility as only half of the core team is willing to step up to the plate and treat the operation more like a start-up and less of a side project.
During the earlier months, our website saw a huge rush of traffic from international regions which are not primarily English-speaking, and we were not able to retain or convert those users since we did not have multilingual moderators in the palace to engage them.
***** Something to notice is that non-western/ primarily English-speaking regions had the most significant reduction in visits in March, with the USA having the lowest reduction. We speculate that this could be due to the economic stability in this region during these uncertain times. This only means we need to shift our focus to other regions that clearly have a more significant interest in the products and tools that we’re building.
Our biggest hurdles are a lack of man-hours and skill, multi-lingual moderation, consistent engaging community development, consistent development due to shortage of team members, and upper-level marketing, and communication due to the size of the marketing team.
Are we a business or a community project?
We bring this up because it is concerning for the future of the project. Most projects can be developed by the community but to take it to the next level and operate more as a professional entity representing a community of thousands we need to operate with a certain degree of professionalism.
Since the inception of RVL, it has been treated as a project, something people attempt on the side. But we’ve reached a point where we need more reliability, consistency, and professionalism to grow. That being said, opening a community project made it such that most of the core team were ‘volunteers’. Many of young age with other IRL commitments. And adults too, have 9 to 5 jobs and IRL commitments. While adults are able to commit to a higher degree as they are only accountable for themselves, younger members are accountable to their parents. This puts us in a tricky position to grow. For this reason, you may notice in the polls or on the later pages we suggest splitting the team into 2 bodies to allow people a way to contribute without the intimidating requirements or heavy expectations.
How can we proceed?
OPTIONS FOR THE COMMUNITY (please read carefully before we open polls for community voting）
1a) Dissolve the foundation, the entire core team steps down, we give refund existing donations and freeze the whole chain 1b) Dissolve the foundation, the core team steps down, and give back funds. White paper, and chain active to be carried on some other time by whoever wills
2a) We ask the inactive core team members to step down from the core team and onboard committed community members onto the core team, and the work continues. If this passes and then fails to work, we will take a revote to pick another option
2b) Split-core team into 2 organizations, the core team and ‘Our Avian’. This gives 2 bodies for 2 types of commitment levels, the core team represents the project and directs ‘Our Avian’, the community-led organization that will spearhead marketing, content, and development. The core team keeps 3 to 6 committed people for upper-level ecosystem strategy and management, Our Avian would need to carry and aid with dev and marketing. PS. Our Avian will be 100% run by the community with not much involvement for the core team, going back to our roots of community-led development
3) The full core team steps down and hands the project over to the community
_________________
NOTE: We believe the value of the network has substantially been elevated over the last 10 months, we’ve made significant progress and established a solid foundation for the project which was nonexistent in September 2021. We believe the network is 10x from its original start date. We note this as we still believe no matter what direction we head, we’ve developed enough for the community to pursue if that is what the community wishes.
If you'd like to take a closer look at our vision, here's a link to our whitepaper: https://avn.network/whitepaper/
Additional links: https://linktr.ee/AvianNetwork
We took the seed and planted it, we need your help to grow it and move to the next stage. We look forward to the discussions on Discord.
The StrawPoll is now open and can be accessed through the link below. Poll: https://strawpoll.com/polls/2ayLWPEJWZ4
The poll closes in 2 weeks' time.
Polls will not allow VPN users and will limit to one vote using an IP address as a reference. Comments on the polls are disabled as we expect the discussion to progress on Discord and other social platforms.
We would recommend looking through this report carefully and taking part in the discussion on Disord before making an informed decision.