coindesk.com
Avalanche’s AVAX token surged Wednesday in digital-asset markets after the smart-contracts blockchain announced plans for a $180 million “liquidity mining incentive program” to scale in decentralized finance, or DeFi.
The token was up by 16% in the last 24 hours at press time, trading at $27.69. Just in the past month, the AVAX price has more than doubled according to data from Messari.
The Avalanche Foundation said in a press release that a $180 million DeFi incentive program titled “Avalanche Rush” will bring top DeFi applications to the platform, including Aave and Curve.
“Aptly dubbed ‘Avalanche Rush,’ the program will lead exactly to that, an avalanche of hot money rushing towards AVAX,” said Denis Vinokourov, head of research at Synergia Capital.
The token is still well off its all-time high six months ago around $59, according to CoinGeko.
“In the spirit of strength in numbers, strong partnerships such as those utilized by Polygon with Curve, Aave and others, is a better strategy to attract and to retain users as opposed to re-inventing the wheel on their own,” said Vinokourov.
Avalanche is an open-source platform for launching DeFi applications and enterprise blockchain deployments in one scalable ecosystem. Developers who build on Avalanche are able to create applications and custom blockchain networks or build on existing private or public subnets, according to Messari.
Often dubbed as an Ethereum alternative, Avalanche says the fact it can process thousands of transactions per second and has low-fees makes it a “haven for Ethereum defectors,” according to Messari Research. It is not a single-chain network like Ethereum as it features multiple chains that perform different functions.
“As DeFi becomes more and more popular, it becomes clear that the Ethereum blockchain is currently struggling to fit all the activity. Thus, it is important to expand to other chains and L2s,” Michael Egorov, CEO at Curve Finance, said in the press release.
“We find Avalanche offering an excellent opportunity with its unique decentralized consensus mechanism, high throughput and low transaction fees,” he added.