blockworks.co
Much has been said of Solana’s recovery since the whole Sam Bankman-Fried thing. But one of the network’s primary rivals, Avalanche, is also having a bit of a moment.
Blink and you might have missed it: Avalanche (AVAX) has flipped bitcoin cash (BCH), polygon (MATIC), polkadot (DOT), tron (TRX) and chainlink (LINK) over the past two weeks.
At $9.8 billion, AVAX is now a top-10 cryptocurrency by market cap (if you don’t count Lido Staked ETH), its highest rank all year.
In US dollar terms, AVAX has jumped 150% year to date — almost all of it over the past month. Bitcoin (BTC) has returned slightly more, with BTC’s rallies largely credited with turning crypto into a sea of green after a dark, lengthy bear market.
Avalanche’s outsized gains are more apparent when tracking its price against bitcoin. Of the top 30 or so cryptocurrencies, AVAX’s bitcoin ratio is the second-best performer over the past three months, having risen 60%, trailing Solana’s, which nearly doubled.
That means a hypothetical crypto trader who sold BTC for AVAX three months ago could now get 60% more bitcoin back on that play — all while BTC itself has rallied 70% against the US dollar.
As of earlier today, ether’s bitcoin ratio meanwhile slipped by about one-fifth — half as bad as Binance’s BNB. Anyone who sold bitcoin for ether (ETH) at the start of September would get almost 20% less BTC if closing those positions today.
Much like Solana, Ethereum, Tron and Polygon, Avalanche is a layer-1 blockchain that supports stablecoins, DeFi applications, memecoins and even Ordinals-like inscriptions.
Still, why are markets favoring Avalanche right now?
Vivek Raman, head of proof of stake at boutique digital asset unit BitOoda, pointed out that all the “alternative layer-1” networks outside of Ethereum are having tremendous runs.
“Solana is up more than seven times from its cycle lows after dropping 95% from its 2021 peak,” Raman said.
“Avalanche is the next major layer-1 that is having a mean reversion bounce and is therefore outperforming right now,” Raman continued. “The major two crypto assets — ETH and BTC — were down much less than altcoins, and this Avalanche move is simply part of a catchup move.”
Avalanche’s tech stack was also used for a recent Project Guardian pilot, led by JPMorgan Onyx, which explored the potential benefits of tokenized investment portfolios.
The actual Avalanche mainnet wasn’t used, though, with the banks playing around with a fresh permissioned (private) version of the blockchain.
Still, Raman reasoned that JPMorgan’s tests “could be a fundamental driver for the [Avalanche] ecosystem.”