Avalanche (AVAX) is a Platform for Creating Custom Blockchains and dApps — Backed by Notable Investors and Material Progress
Investigating why the likes of a16z, Naval Ravikant, and Polychain would be interested in yet another Layer-1 Ethereum competitor.
Avalanche ($AVAX) is a project by Ava Labs. It is currently led by Cornell Professor Emin Gün Sirer, who founded Avalanche in partnership with Kevin Sekniqi and Maofan Yin. The project released a mainnet in September 2020, after more than a year in development.
Ava Labs has raised approximately $60M in funding over 5 rounds. The investment rounds included a $6M Series A in February 2019 and a $12M private token sale of its AVAX token in June 2020. Angel investors included Balaji Srinivasan and Naval Ravikant. Avalanche’s public token sale raised $42M in 4.5 hours, indicating strong and institutional-level demand from the onset.
VC Investors (15 in total): TRGC, Dragonfly Capital, Polychain Capital, Fundamental Labs, Digital Asset Capital Management, Andreessen Horowitz, Galaxy Digital, NGC Ventures, Initialized Capital, Bitmain, et al.
Avalanche dedicated a significant portion of AVAX supply toward community grants, and developer interest has quickly accelerated with thousands of projects already underway in the network. A network is only as valuable as its usage, and Avalanche’s early adoption is a strong sign for future demand.
The Avalanche ($AVAX) token is the native utility and governance token of the Avalanche protocol, which operates on the Avalanche consensus algorithm. A capped and inflationary Bitcoin-like emissions schedule, staking requirements, and fee burning create a deflationary and scarcity effect on AVAX, thus placing upward pressure on the price.
The aforementioned demand for the network’s utility by developers compounds price appreciation pressure for AVAX, an underlying component of the Avalanche ecosystem.
$AVAX outperformed the overall crypto market back in the risk-on environment of January 2021, alongside other DeFi and smart contract platforms.
Competition: Many protocols exist which aim to achieve similar goals to Avalanche. These include Polkadot, Dfinity, Near Protocol, Algorand, Cardano, Solana, and Ethereum 2.0.
About AVAX
Its native, fixed-supply AVAX coin is the platform’s unit of account, used for paying transaction fees and for staking in Avalanche’s consensus process
