$AVAX, the native token of smart contracts platform Avalanche, is having one hell of a weekend, overtakinghighly popular dog meme cryptocurrency Shiba Inu ($SHIB) to become the 11th most valuable cryptoasset by market cap.
What is Avalanche ($AVAX)?
Below is a brief description of Avalanche from its developer documentation:
“Avalanche is an open-source platform for launching decentralized applications and enterprise blockchain deployments in one interoperable, highly scalable ecosystem. Avalanche is the first decentralized smart contracts platform built for the scale of global finance, with near-instant transaction finality. Ethereum developers can quickly build on Avalanche as Solidity works out-of-the-box.
“A key difference between Avalanche and other decentralized networks is the consensus protocol. Over time, people have come to a false understanding that blockchains have to be slow and not scalable. The Avalanche protocol employs a novel approach to consensus to achieve its strong safety guarantees, quick finality, and high-throughput without compromising decentralization.
“AVAX is the native token of Avalanche. It’s a hard-capped, scarce asset that is used to pay for fees, secure the platform through staking, and provide a basic unit of account between the multiple subnets created on Avalanche. 1 nAVAX is equal to 0.000000001 AVAX.“
Avalanche is being developed by Ava Labs, a blockchain startup founded in Brooklyn, New York in 2018 by Professor Emin Gün Sirer (CEO), who does computer science research at Cornell University, Kevin Sekniqi (COO), and Ted Yin (Chief Protocol Architect).
$AVAX’s Price Action
According to data by TradingView, on crypto exchange Binance, at 14:13 p.m. UTC on November 21, the $AVAX price got as high as $146.3250, which allowed it to flip Dogecoin ($DOGE) to take 10th place and set a new all-time high.
This led crypto quant Benjamin Cowen to tweet:
However, since then, probably due to shorting and profit-taking, the $AVAX price has given back some of today’s earlier gains. Currently (i.e. as of 05:45 p.m. UTC), $AVAX is trading around $132.14, up 7.65% in the past 24-hour period.
Cowen has made a YouTube video discussing $AVAX’s parabolic rally:
$AVAX started the year at $3.19. This means its return-on-investment (vs USD) for the year-to-date (YTD) period is an incredible 4042%.
One of the many people currently feeling regretful about not investing in $AVAX when it was much cheaper is crypto influencer Layah Heilpern:
One crypto analyst who doesn’t seem to think that it is too late to invest in $AVAX is Josh Rager, who says that even a 2X from here (in the next few weeks/months) is a realistic target given the amount of money being invested in the Avalanche ecosystem and the number of Avalanche-powered projects being built, and apparently sees Avalanche as a serious threat to Solana ($SOL).
It is worth pointing out at this point that on November 2, Grayscale Investments, a subsidiary of Digital Currency Group (DCG), announced that it had added $AVAX to its list of “assets under consideration”, meaning that in the future it might be offering an $AVAX investment product.
The following infographics by Coin98 give a rough idea of how much and how fast the Avalanche ecosystem has been growing:
Kyle Davies, Co-Founder and Chairman of Singapore-based crypto-focused hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, predicted yesterday that within the next three months the number of projects powered by Avalanche would be 10X of the current number.
Disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed by the author, or any people mentioned in this article, are for informational purposes only, and they do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice. Investing in or trading cryptoassets comes with a risk of financial loss.
Image Credit
Featured Image by “_anaposa_” via Pixabay
