Avalanche Hits All-Time High Above $100 as DeFi Ecosystem Crosses $10B

Avalanche (AVAX), one of the contenders for the “Ethereum killer” title, is among the top gainers over the last 24 hours.

The network’s token is up 12.7%, having soared to an all-time above $102.04 on Tuesday night before sliding down to $99.11 at the time of writing.

With a market capitalization of more than $21.3 billion, AVAX is currently the 12th most valued network in the crypto market, according to data from CoinGecko.

Avalanche’s other notable achievement is that the total value of funds locked in the protocol’s various DeFi projects has now surpassed a massive milestone of $10 billion, as data from DeFi Llama shows.

Avalanche is a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain designed for running smart contracts, which, in turn, serve as the backbone for many decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols and applications.

Boasting high transaction throughput and low fees, Avalanche also supports the creation of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and more.

Strong three months for Avalanche

The latest price action for AVAX could be attributed to a variety of bullish developments, ranging from big-name partnerships, growing DeFi activity, and a newly-launched fund to grow Avalanche projects.

On Tuesday, Ava Labs, the company behind the development of the Avalanche network, announced a joint effort with Deloitte, one of the world’s "Big 4" accounting firms.

The collaboration will see the two companies launch a new cloud-based platform that will utilize the Avalanche blockchain to improve security, speed, and accuracy of Federal Emergency Management Agency reimbursements.

Activity on Avalanche has also escalated quickly since the end of August this year when the total value locked (TVL) in the network first soared over $1 billion. It took the network roughly three months to grow another tenfold in terms of TVL.

Earlier this month, the Avalanche Foundation launched Blizzard, a new fund with more than $200 million dedicated to growing the network’s ecosystem. These funds will be allocated specifically to projects building in DeFi, NFTs, and enterprise applications among other sectors.

The new fund will also deploy capital to explore other emerging use cases such as security token issuances, liquidity providers, and self-sovereign identity.

Prior to that, the Avalanche Foundation raised $230 million from a private token sale led by Polychain Capital and Three Arrows Capital.

The network enjoyed an additional boost last month when it was listed by Coinbase—both on the professional trading platform and in the exchange’s wallet.