On Monday, November 9, two things happened on Avalanche within the same day, in two completely different registers. In Bangkok, we held Builder's Bowl #1 with Avalanche's Team1 and shipped Catfooding v0.4. Hours later, in New York, Ava Labs announced that Avalanche will serve as the core ledger for the clearing firm behind a planned NYSE-affiliated tokenized-securities platform — the exchange that owns the New York Stock Exchange, picking Avalanche to settle trades on a 24/7 venue for tokenized U.S. equities, pending regulatory approval.
Neither event caused the other. But they land on the same chain, in the same month, on opposite ends of a split that's been building quietly for about a year: institutional-grade tokenized-equity infrastructure on one side, retail-grade tokenized stocks on the other. Builder's Bowl #1 turned out to be a small, concrete look at exactly that split, from the ground.
Builder's Bowl #1
Team1 — Avalanche's community team in Thailand — and Catfooding held Builder's Bowl #1 in Bangkok, Monday 9 Nov, 3–6 PM. Seventeen people came. We showed up with the catfooding-onchain-skills exercise, demos, merch and food, and shipped Catfooding v0.4 (app.catfooding.com) the same day.
Agent Cats had already been adopted on Avalanche's Fuji testnet before v0.4; the release wasn't the start of that. What v0.4 adds: a page for each cat showing when it was adopted on-chain, a share card, and its own wallet (ERC-6551); sign-in from a phone wallet via WalletConnect; Jessica's new design; and the CoAgentic book shown read-only across both chains.
The part built for agents specifically is the kit, catfooding-onchain-skills. It's a set of skills a coding agent (Claude Code, Codex and others) can follow to set up a test wallet, get test dollars, adopt an Agent Cat on Fuji, and have that cat read tokenized-stock prices on other chains against the real share price — pulling that market data from CoAgentic Markets' own lab. "Agent Cats with CoAgentic Markets skills" is a literal description, not a tagline.
Spot the Fake
One of the kit's skills, run from a testnet Agent Cat, is a hunt: search Avalanche's open DEX pools for tokens named after real stocks — TSLA, AAPL and the rest — and check whether any of them is actually the issuer's. The check isn't the name or the symbol; it's whether the issuer's own contract controls the token, whether its price tracks the real share fairly, and whether you can actually get out of the position. An agent that trusts the ticker buys the copy: to a script, a token called TSLA looks just like Tesla. Run that hunt on Avalanche's open pools today and you'll find more than a dozen tokens carrying Tesla's name alone, and none of them pass. Ethereum has genuine issuer tokens you can check against, for comparison; Avalanche's open pools, so far, don't.
That's not because Avalanche has no real tokenized-stock issuance — it has plenty, mostly through Dinari, which has deployed hundreds of tokenized stocks, ETFs and REITs on Avalanche's C-Chain. It's because Dinari's tokens are KYC-gated: buying one means going through Dinari's own platform, not an open pool. Dinari doesn't publish its Avalanche contract addresses the way an issuer like xStocks does on other chains, so the kit has no fingerprint to check a token against — which means if you ever see a token on Avalanche claiming to be a Dinari dShare, the honest answer is "can't confirm," not "fake." The hunt can catch an obvious copy. It can't clear a genuine KYC-gated token it was never shown.
That gap — open pools on one side, KYC-gated issuance on the other, invisible to each other almost by design — is the same gap the day's other news sits inside.
The Same Day, Wall Street Called
Hours after Builder's Bowl #1 wrapped, Ava Labs announced that Avalanche will be the core ledger technology for the clearing firm behind an NYSE-affiliated platform for 24/7 trading of tokenized U.S. equities. NYSE's existing matching technology handles the trades; Avalanche handles the post-trade ledger and settlement.
It's still planned, not live — it needs regulatory approval, and no clearing firm or launch date has been named in Ava Labs' own announcement, though a couple of outlets report a fourth-quarter target. AVAX rose roughly 8% on the news. The deal follows about a year of testing between Avalanche and ICE, NYSE's parent, first reported back in September.
This is the institutional side of the same split the fake-token hunt runs into on Avalanche's own open pools: KYC, controlled participation, regulated transfer agents, and settlement that doesn't need to show up as public DEX volume to be real. Avalanche's own numbers already lean this way — a reported $131 million week of tokenized-stock inflows in late September came almost entirely from one product, Securitize's own share token, according to press reports, not a broad retail rally.
The retail-grade side of tokenized equities — xStocks-style tokens that trade permissionlessly in open pools — has mostly lived on other chains: X Layer, Solana, Robinhood Chain. CoAgentic Markets, our own analytical layer, watches 16 verified xStocks on X Layer for exactly that kind of open-market liquidity; it reads the same retail-grade, permissionless side of the split that the fake-token hunt is checking on Avalanche, not an "institutional" counterpart to it. Avalanche is unusual precisely because it's now carrying both registers on the same chain: an institutional settlement rail that doesn't trade in the open, and a testnet full of agents checking an open market that, on Avalanche, mostly turns up copies.
The Catfooding Story So Far
This isn't the first time we've written about Catfooding. The Founder's Note from 16 October introduced app.catfooding.com as a client of the CoAgentic feed — "a mascot that eats Markets data and refuses bad food" — and its own project, co-founded with a collaborator who leads brand and product experience. It closed on a question: could we get Catfooding in front of people who didn't build it? Builder's Bowl #1 is that question, answered: a room of people who didn't build it, adopting Agent Cats of their own.
But the app didn't come first. The community did. Here's Jessica, Catfooding's co-founder, on how it started.
In Jessica's words:
Catfooding started with a simple message from JC on the morning of September 7th.
Me: "Any other good events you're going to?"
JC: "We should create one. An AI-themed dev meetup."
Me: "Let's do it. They do exist, but we can be zesty."
And that was it.
We'd noticed that while Bangkok had plenty of interesting tech events, there wasn't really a consistent, reliable AI meetup where people could come together regularly, share what they were working on, and connect with others exploring the space. We wanted to create something people could count on, but also something a little different. Less formal, more creative, and open to anyone curious about building with AI.
So we applied ourselves, step by step, and that's how Catfooding was born.
What started as a spontaneous idea quickly grew into something much bigger than we anticipated. More and more people began showing up, and we were genuinely blown away by the talent, creativity and diversity of the people walking through the door. One attendee had just landed in Bangkok from Italy, found the event through GrokBot, and came straight from the airport to join us — she enjoyed it so much that she came back the following week.
We've since welcomed people from all over the world, each bringing their own perspectives, skills and ways of working with AI. It's not just developers sitting around talking code — we have artists, designers, game developers, people building educational apps, entrepreneurs and people exploring AI in ways I hadn't even considered before. People come to share what they're building, discuss the latest developments, swap tips and tricks, collaborate on ideas, and have a good old chat and a laugh.
We even have our own real-life cat mascot, Benjamin the Bengal, who occasionally graces us with his presence. He's known to give attendees the odd little nip — or kiss, as we prefer to call it.
Alongside building the community, we've also been developing the Catfooding platform and app, which has evolved into an intuitive UI for CoAgentic Markets data. At the heart of it is Mochi, our purple cat mascot, who helps people read the markets alongside CoAgentic's agents. He's also become the face of Catfooding, appearing throughout our artwork, animations, videos and branding.
We've even created a pixel-art version of Mochi, which we minted on Avalanche's Fuji testnet during this, our sixth meetup, held in collaboration with Avalanche's Team1 Thailand. It was a fun moment seeing something that began as a character design become part of an onchain experience.
Looking back, it's been an incredible journey, and I'm genuinely proud of how organically everything has grown. There was no grand plan or elaborate strategy. Just two people with an idea, a willingness to give it a go, and a growing community of people who made it worth continuing.
That's been the real magic of Catfooding.
One more piece of context behind Mochi and the markets he reads: CoAgentic runs a small book of tokenized stocks with real money, on X Layer and Solana, as research and development. It's how the engine Catfooding shows read-only gets tested against real markets — not a track record to report, just the R&D behind what Mochi and the Agent Cats draw on.
What's Next
Picnic in the Park. Catfooding's next event is a picnic — no stage, no badges, just mats, great food, refreshments, incredible merch and the people you met all week. It runs Saturday 28 and Sunday 29 November, during Binance Blockchain Week, around lunchtime (12–2 PM), on the lawn at Benjakitti Park in Bangkok, right next to the Queen Sirikit National Convention Centre — close enough to walk straight over from the halls. Saturday has an open slot for a sponsor or collaborator; Sunday is organized by Catfooding with Team1. It's likely to be Catfooding's most experimental event yet, built around activities meant to produce content, not just attendance. All welcome — and if your team wants to join in, help sponsor, or just come hang out, get in touch. Sign up on Luma for Saturday or Sunday.
A Builders Bowl marketplace, coming. The meetups keep turning up builds worth a second look — apps, games, agents, like the onchain-skills kit itself. We're working on a Builders Bowl marketplace: somewhere to show and find what members have built, starting from what's already been demoed at the meetups. It's coming, not live — for now, think of it as a place to show and discover, not to buy, sell or pay.
And on funding: we're updating CoAgentic's pitch deck to bring in the Catfooding story, running it past CoAgentic's Shark Council under a new review process, while we look for sponsors and strategic partners for Catfooding. More on that and other developments coming soon.
— JC and Jessica, CoAgentic Dev and Catfooding. Corrections and verifiable additions via the CoAgentic contact page.