Investment giant VanEck is weighing in on Ethereum (ETH) rival Avalanche (AVAX), warning that the project faces numerous serious headwinds.
In a new report on the digital asset markets, VanEck analysts say that on-chain activity on Avalanche’s C-Chain has collapsed to critical levels.
VanEck notes how Avalanche generated about $11,000 in fees per day in September, a 98.9% drop from its peak two years ago.
“Avalanche’s blockchain eventually became a financial success in the fall of 2021 on its in-house developed EVM (Ethereum virtual machine) blockchain, called the C-Chain (contract chain). At its peak, the C-Chain held more than $10 billion TVL (total value locked) locked in its smart contracts, boasted $1 million in fees per day, and consistently held over 100,000 DAUs (daily active users).
In September 2023, those figures had dwindled to $500 million in TVL, $11,000 per day in fees, and 34,-000 daily active users.”
VanEck says that while Avalanche has great technology, it doesn’t have the same advantages as Ethereum or other ETH competitors and suffers from a lack of venture capital (VC) backing and a smaller developer community.
“Though we have great confidence in the technical abilities of Avalanche, we are unsure if Avalanche will be able to use its strong marketing talent to bring in the enterprise customers needed to revitalize Avalanche’s chain of chains, additionally, with a rapidly vaporizing developer base and a crop of VC capital migrating away from all but the top projects in crypto, its hard to be bullish on the long-term prospects of Avalanche.
Avalanche does not have the sticky coder base nor the backing of Jump Capital to create a 1 million TPS (transactions per second) chain, and it also lacks the thriving ecosystem of developers and capital that Ethereum retains.
That said, anything could happen in a bull market, and we continue to see Avalanche announce fascinating technical solutions to complex blockchain problems. But until it gets applications that bring in new users, AVAX will suffer accordingly.”
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