In brief
- The price of Avalanche's native token AVAX has risen from $22 to $50 over the past seven days.
- This comes on the heels of the announcement of "Avalanche Rush," a new $180 million mining incentive program.
The price of AVAX, the native token of scalability-focused blockchain platform Avalanche, has more than doubled since its developers launched a $180 million decentralized finance (DeFi) incentive program last week.
DeFi is a growing niche in crypto, which seeks to offer many of the same financial services as banks and brokers, such as lending and borrowing, but without using a centralized entity.
At the time of writing, AVAX was trading at around $49, up roughly 2.5% on the day, according to crypto metrics platform CoinGecko.
The token’s weekly price journey, however, was more impressive. On August 17, a day before the “Avalanche Rush” program was announced, AVAX hovered around $22. The token’s price has increased by around 122% since then.
Avalanche is an open-source platform for financial primitives and decentralized applications, akin to Ethereum. Avalanche has, however, been designed with scalability and fast confirmation times as top priorities.
“Avalanche Rush,” which kicked off the price rally, is a $180 million liquidity mining incentive program for DeFi applications, buoyed by the addition of two popular DeFi protocols—Aave and Curve Finance. Liquidity mining programs allow DeFi users to earn extra tokens on whatever yield they already receive from putting them into a liquidity pool. Lenders can borrow money from the pool, while contributors get passive income on their crypto.
“Avalanche Rush will be a showcase for users to see the power of Avalanche, and dive into a vibrant community at the cutting edge of decentralized finance,” said Emin Gün Sirer, director of the Avalanche Foundation, in an announcement.
What Is Avalanche Network (AVAX)? The 'Flexible' Ethereum Competitor
In the race to produce the fastest, most feature-complete blockchain there is, a handful of major players have emerged in the last few years. Among these, Avalanche—an open-source platform for new financial primitives and decentralized applications—has solidified as one of the front-runners. Here, we take a look at what makes it stand out in an increasingly populated industry. What is Avalanche? Avalanche is a platform developed by Ava Labs that allows anybody to easily produce their own multi-...
In the future, the project's foundation says it plans to integrate additional blue-chip DeFi protocols as part of the new program and has already allocated resources for this purpose.
