2021 was the year that Avalanche snowballed into the top 10 crypto’s in the world. To start the year, AVAX was barely cracking the top 75, sitting at a price of only $3.50. To put it mildly, it was a great year for the project and those who were believers early on in 2021. A […] The post Top Five Avalanche Stories of 2021 appeared first on CryptosRus.

Top Five Avalanche Stories of 2021

2021 was the year that Avalanche snowballed into the top 10 crypto’s in the world. To start the year, AVAX was barely cracking the top 75, sitting at a price of only $3.50. To put it mildly, it was a great year for the project and those who were believers early on in 2021.

A lot happened to propel AVAX into the top 10. Here are our top 5 AVAX stories of 2021.

5. NHL Partnership With The New York Islanders

This was a bit of a sleeper story, but the implications were major for Avalanche nonetheless. On November 19th, Avalanche announced that their NFT marketplace, Orange Comet, became the “Exclusive NFT Partner of the NY Islanders and UBS Arena.” Orange Comet is an NFT platform but also a metaverse/web3 play with 3D digital design studios.

The multi-year partnership is intended to transform the fan experience and “bridge the gap between digital art, storytelling, and visual imagery.” The move into a major league like the NHL and with a storied franchise like the Islanders was a great example of how Avalanche is intent on making moves that other Layer 1’s have yet to branch into.

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4. Ryval Partnership 

Ryval, dubbed the “stock market of litigation financing” launched their enterprise-grade solution on Avalanche this summer with the completion of their “Initial Litigation Offerings.” These offerings allow users to “buy and sell tokens that represent shares in a litigation and access a multi-billion dollar investment class previously unavailable to the public.”

It is a very unique enterprise use case, and represents how AVAX seeks to build a chain with far more than just DeFi and ‘degen’ money markets. The world’s first ILO was completed in late October. The reason this story is so big, is because it presents one of the most unique ways blockchain has unlocked capital and new investment markets to the common person.

3. Deloitte Partnership

Many see Deloitte, if they know of it at all, as a boring auditing/accounting firm. They are the ones who are usually contracted to inspect hotels to ensure compliance to standards, as an example. They are a massive firm, in fact, the third largest private company in the US. The partnership wasn’t boring at all for the price of Avalanche.

After the announcement was made on November 16th that Deloitte would be using Avalanche “to improve security, speed and accuracy of Federal Emergency Management Agency reimbursements”, the price of AVAX surged over 33%, and cracked the top 10 for the first time. It was the beginning of a new era for Avalanche.

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2. The Launch of Benqi

Lending and borrowing platforms (money markets) are the backbone of DeFi. Whenever a chain is able to launch a successful money market protocol, the expansion and growth can be monumental because of the massive amount of liquidity they generate. This was the case when Benqi launched in August of this year. It is now the 17th largest DeFi protocol in the market with nearly $4 billion in TVL.

Benqi is no doubt one of the top 2 isolated catalysts for the parabolic rise of Avalanche. As you can see in the below image, when Benqi launched on August 19th, the price of AVAX went wild; pulling a 4x in 90 days after launch. Because it only runs on Avalanche and the token is a native asset on Avalanche, it benefits their chain only, which is worth noting.

credit: coinmarketcap

1. Avalanche Rush

The playbook of Avalanche was to give devs huge liquidity incentives to build and migrate to Avalanche. Seems simple enough, right? That’s exactly what Near protocol and others are doing today, taking a page out of their playbook. Avalanche Rush was a liquidity mining incentive program of more than $180 million dollars that actually launched the same day Benqi launched–which is the other catalyst that caused the quick 4x.

“Have you bridged yet?” was going viral on Twitter at the time, referencing the Avalanche bridge that launched at the same time. The combination of Avalanche Rush and the new bridge was a major win for AVAX as blue-chip ETH protocols like Curve Finance, AAVE, and Sushi Swap all ported over and launched $700m incentives programs.

Avalanche TVL went from just around $200 million to to over $2 billion just 10 days after the the project launched.

credit: defillama

The TVL now sits at over $20 billion. (Also, a major factor is its EVM compatible C chain that leverages the Ethereum user base for growth). There is no doubt this program was executed flawlessly and diligently, and led to AVAX being one of the most outstanding projects in 2021.

Will their users stay sticky in their native protocols, is the question. Is the technology a sufficient moat to keep users inside? Time will tell. 

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The post Top Five Avalanche Stories of 2021 appeared first on CryptosRus.