On Saturday (November 20), the price of $AVAX, the native token of smart contracts platform Avalanche, recorded a new all-time high of $119.98 on crypto exchange Binance.
What is Avalanche ($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 08:06 a.m. UTC on November 20, the $AVAX price got as high as $11.98, which is a new all-time high. Currently (i.e. as of 11:50 a.m. UTC), $AVAX is trading around $117.27, up 9.77% in the past 24-hour period.
As for the year-to-date (YTD) period, $AVAX’s return-on-investment (vs USD) is an incredible 3576%.
What People Are Saying About Avalanche
The following infographics by Coin98 give a rough idea of how much and how fast the Avalanche ecosystem has been growing:
On November 10, Patrick Sutton, Director of Communications at Ava Labs, talked about the “exponential growth” of transactions on Avalanche’s Contract Chain (aka “C-Chain”).
Luigi D’Onorio DeMeo, Director of DeFi at Ava Labs said on Monday (November 15) that the number of daily active addresses (currently around 70,000) has gone up 20X in the past three months.
On Wednesday (November 17), Binance.US, which is the U.S. arm of crypto exchange Binance, announced that on November 18 it would be listing $AVAX and open trading on open trading on trading on AVAX/USD and AVAX/USDT.
Yesterday (November 19), Jay Kurahashi-Sofue, VP of Marketing at Ava Labs, said that the reason Avalanche is currently the fourth most popular blockchain by total valued locked (TVL) in USD — according to data by Defi Llama — is that people “prefer fast, cheap, secure blockchains–all with a vibrant, passionate community.”
Kyle Davies, Co-Founder and Chairman of Singapore-based crypto-focused hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, predicted that within the next three months the number of projects powered by Avalanche would be 10X what is today.
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
