The smart contract platform Avalanche’s native AVAX token once again surged higher today, following massive price gains last week boosted by the news that it is integrating with the major decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols Aave and Curve Finance (CRV).
At press time on Monday (09:36 UTC), AVAX is up by 14.2% over the past 24 hours, trading at USD 49.06. The price is further up 162% for the past 7 days, making it the week’s best performing asset – while it is also today’s third-best performing asset – among the top 100 cryptoassets by market capitalization, per data from CoinGecko.
The impressive performance for AVAX – currently ranked as the 23rd most valuable cryptoassets – has come after Avalanche on August 18 announced a new incentive program dubbed “Avalanche Rush” to bring more applications to the blockchain. So far, the program has successfully lured both Aave and Curve to launch on Avalanche, with both being among the largest DeFi protocols by total value locked (TVL).
According to a Medium post by the Avalanche team, USD 180m has been set aside by the Avalanche Foundation for the new liquidity mining incentive program. More specifically, the post said that the AVAX token will be used as a liquidity mining incentive for Aave and Curve users over a 3-month period, with the biggest share allocated to Aave.
“Deploying Aave and Curve encourages high-speed, low-cost, and more diverse DeFi offerings on the Avalanche public blockchain,” the Avalanche team wrote in the post. It also added that the platform will “continue integrating additional blue-chip DeFi protocols” as part of the program.
Despite the Avalanche Rush program being announced on August 18, the current bull-run for AVAX started as early as July 20, with gains of well over 100% seen between then and the announcement day on August 18. Following that day, however, the rally accelerated with massive buying pressure pushing the price up another 128% at its peak.
The Avalanche platform, created by computer science professor Emin Gün Sirer of Cornell University as an alternative to Ethereum (ETH), has seen increased traction since its launch in September 2020. Helped by the sometimes high fees and slow transaction speeds on Ethereum, the network has seen users migrating from Ethereum via the newly launched Avalanche Bridge, which is said to be significantly cheaper and better than the previous Avalanche-Ethereum Bridge.
With fundamentals firmly supporting price growth at the moment, the price of AVAX now also looks strong from a technical analysis standpoint, with only the prior all-time high of USD 60 from February now acting as resistance to the upside. Meanwhile, local price peaks in the USD 38 to USD 40 range from April and May could provide some support to the downside should the rally reverse.
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