Avalanche up 113% Since Launch of $180 Million Incentive Program

By Liam Frost

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.

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.

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