August 19, 2021: Avalanche Rush 🏂🏔️
$AVAX announces $180MM incentives to bring Curve + Aave to Avalanche
Curve is heading to Avalanche!
While weaker protocols are nervously considering limping into DeFi, the Avalanche blockchain is entering with a bang. They announced a whopping $180MM DeFi Incentive Program to bring Curve and Aave onto their chain in a campaign they’re calling “Avalanche Rush.”
“We find Avalanche offering an excellent opportunity with its unique decentralized consensus mechanism, high throughput and low transaction fees”
—Michael Egorov, CEO at Curve Finance
“The combination of Aave, Curve, and Avalanche will create really interesting synergies that DeFi users will be excited about.”
— Emin Gün Sirer, CEO at Avalanche
This shifts the Curve wars just shifted to a lucrative new front. Earlier this week we looked at Harmonic’s attempts to woo Curve. Looks like they may need to up their offer, as Curve is attracting deeper pocketed suitors.
Avalanche is currently the 12th largest blockchain by total value locked with $200MM, currently dominated by Pangolin Finance. Notably, this value locked is about the same scale as the commitment to this new incentives program, representing a major commitment from the blockchain.
Avalanche boasts the fastest time-to-finality among blockchains — their white paper claims their settlement mechanism can hit 5000+ transactions settled in less than a second. They also claim the largest number of validators on a proof of stake chain. A good breakdown of Avalanche is available here.
If you’re interested in setting up your wallet on the Avalanche Blockchain in advance, you can make use of the recently launched Avalanche Bridge. Their FAQ claims they’ll even hook you up with 0.1 AVAX when you transfer some funds over, but we haven’t tested this so caveat emptor.
This announcement comes at a nice time for Curve, given the major supply squeeze from its first major reduction in inflation. Dwindling $CRV supply plus increasing demand from additional blockchains… you do the research...
The collaboration has allegedly been underway for several months. The team appears to be very excited to break the silence.
The most bullish users are hoping this brings some of the magic to $AVAX that Curve’s deployment on Polygon brought to $MATIC. The MATIC token has enjoyed quite a nice little ride since Curve unlocked DeFi on its platform, and Polygon is now the 4th largest chain for DeFi activity with over $5 billion locked in its platform.
It’s a good move for Avalanche, which is sitting on a pile of money. Their Avalanche token ($AVAX) is currently the 32nd largest with a market cap of over $5 billion. Gotta put that money to use somehow…
If you are interested in learning more, check out their white papers and their website.
For more info, check our live market data at https://curvemarketcap.com/ or our subscribe to our daily newsletter at https://curve.substack.com/. Nothing in our newsletter can be construed as financial advice. Author is a $CRV maximalist and has no positions in Avalanche or $AVAX.