Avalanche Up 16% After Network Launch of USDC Stablecoin

AVAX, the native token of the Avalanche blockchain, is up 16.2% in the last 24 hours, leading the charge in the reviving markets.

The token’s price began soaring on Tuesday after payments company Circle announced the deployment of its USDC stablecoin on the Avalanche network.

AVAX reached its all-time high of $144.96 on November 21, briefly entering the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. As markets tumbled, the price of the token fell below $77 earlier this week, recovering to $91.53 today, according to CoinGecko.

Avalanche is a smart contracts platform designed for building decentralized applications (dapps) and custom blockchains based on different use cases. The network boasts low transaction fees and fast confirmation times, making it an attractive network for all things decentralized finance (DeFi).

The number of users and developers has driven the total value of locked assets (TVL) across Avalanche-based DeFi projects to nearly $11 billion, according to data from Defi Llama. The ecosystem’s high of $13.79 billion came on December 2.

Commenting on the addition of USDC to the Avalanche blockchain, Circle said that “DeFi and other applications will now have access to native USDC liquidity, eliminating the need for costly token bridges and unsupported wrapped tokens.”

The Boston-based company added that USDC liquidity should also help fuel the rapid growth of the Avalanche ecosystem as more businesses turn to the popular stablecoin.

USDC was launched in May 2018 in a joint effort by Circle and crypto exchange Coinbase. With a market cap of nearly $42 billion, it is currently the industry’s six-largest digital asset and second-largest stablecoin.

Avalanche Slides into Top 10 as Ethereum Users Complain About Gas Fees

Avalanche, a high-speed low-cost blockchain that wants to take on Ethereum, has made its way into the top ten coins by market capitalization. The coin’s now worth $134.74 and has a market capitalization of $30.19 billion. It set its all-time high earlier today when it peaked at $146.22. Avalanche rose to the top 10 position eight hours after Zhu Su, the CEO of Singaporean crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, tweeted that he had “abandoned Ethereum despite supporting it in the past”.  Three A...

With the addition of Avalanche, USDC is now supported on a total of seven blockchains, including Ethereum, Algorand, Stellar, Solana, Hedera Hashgraph, and TRON.

Markets rebound

Elsewhere, there’s cautious optimism as the broader crypto market has slightly rebounded from recent losses.

Bitcoin is up 3% over the day, trading at about $48,500, while Ethereum grew by 2.8% to about $3,880 by the time of writing.

Dogecoin is up 14% to $0.18, still relishing Elon Musk’s recent announcement that Tesla will accept the meme coin for merchandise payments, while other notable gainers include Elrond (+19.5%), Kadena (+15%), PancakeSwap (+13.8%), Polygon (+10%), and Solana (+9%).