• Launched in September 2020, Avalanche has built the fastest smart contracts platform in the blockchain industry
• Avalanche is celebrating the first anniversary of its Mainnet launch with some remarkable milestones
• To support the growth of its public ecosystem, Avalanche launched a $230 million private sale of AVAX tokens along with $60 million in fundraising
• AVAX has been one of the top-performing cryptos, gaining more than 70% in 30 days

Avalanche is designed to solve some of the limitations of older blockchain platforms, including centralization, slow transaction speeds, and scalability. Launched in September 2020, Avalanche has been building powerful decentralized applications and custom blockchain implementations.

The project runs one of the fastest blockchains currently and promises powerful scaling capabilities and quick confirmation times. According to Emin Gün Sirer, Avalanche will scale better than Ethereum 2.0. So, how has Avalanche fared?

Recent Developments

Avalanche has broken into the news for its peaking prices and mainnet launch. Leading up to its mainnet launch anniversary, Avalanche launched a $230 million private sale of AVAX tokens to support the growth of the Avalanche public blockchain ecosystem.

Polychain supported the round, along with Three Arrows Capital, R/Crypto Fund, Dragonfly, CMS Holdings, Collab+Currency, Lvna Capital, and a group of angel investors and family offices.

The Avalanche Foundation also revealed a $60 million funding round. Of the $60 million, $45 million came from a July 2020 public token sale and private sale led by Mike Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital, Bitmain, and Initialized Capital.

In August, Avalanche Foundation launched the new Avalanche Bridge (AB), ushering in the next generation of cross-chain bridging. The bridge delivers the best user experience while prioritizing security and low costs.

Avalanche has also launched its first Dynamic Market Maker (DMM) on the network. In addition, Kyber Network will be looking to bring enhanced liquidity and seamless token swaps on Avalanche.

Kyber Network joined the Avalanche ecosystem as part of the $180 million DeFi incentive program. Titled Avalanche Rush, the program seeks to add blue-chip DeFi applications to Avalanche. Already, Aave and Curve have joined the program.

On September 18, Avalanche announced the successful AP4 activation on the Fuji Testnet. In addition to its already impressive processing speed of up to 4,500 transactions per second, the Apricot upgrade brought much cheaper fees to the network.

Clearly pleased with the updates, @MantrasEnergy tweeted:

In expanding its reach, on September 20, Moralis announced full Avalanche support. Moralis now gives developers on the Avalanche network an easier protocol for dApps. As the Avalanche Rush picks up traction, @CryptoDoggy95, wrote:

There are currently over 270 projects building on Avalanche, including leading projects like Tether, SushiSwap, Chainlink, Circle, and The Graph, and over a thousand validator nodes staking tokens.

Future Events

Avalanche has announced a partnership with Encode Club, an online blockchain education platform. According to Avalanche, working with Encode Club will start in October.

The partnership will see both projects educate people about blockchain and Avalanche and onboard them into the crypto ecosystem. The nine-month program will start with a  10-week “solidity coding boot camp teaching web 2.0 developers about building for Web3 and Avalanche.”

In the coming months, Avalanche will be releasing the Avalanche Wallet V6 – a secure, non-custodial wallet for storing Avalanche assets.

Price Update

AVAX, Avalanche’s native token, has also been another shining star. Over the last month, AVAX has gained more than 70%, putting it at the top of the gainers’ list.

The 30-day price chart of Avalanche (AVAX). Source: Tradingview

AVAX has gained more than 4% in 24 hours. At the time of this writing, AVAX trades at $70.700 a piece. Avalanche is now ranked as the 11th largest cryptocurrency, with a market cap of $15.72 billion.

On The Flipside

• While Avalanche has enjoyed outstanding success in the market, it has been criticized for being too centralized 
• The situation is further highlighted by the recent fundraising round 
• The round featured venture capitalists like Mike Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital, Bitmain, and Initialized Capital

Community

Despite being one of the younger projects, Avalanche has built a strong community with an outstanding online presence. On Twitter, Avalanche has over 258k followers, while Ava Labs has over 23.5k.

Avalanche has reached this feat through a strong social media presence and spectacular community involvement. The DailyCoin Team discovered that the Avalanche community is exceptionally bullish about the future of the project. @mohamme77333916 on Twitter wrote;

Clearly happy with the developments on Avalanche, @KryptoDany, wrote;

Why You Should Care?

Avalanche sells itself as the fastest smart contracts platform in the blockchain industry. Within a year of its launch, Avalanche already has the most validators securing its activity of any proof-of-stake protocol. With its mainnet launch, Avalanche will be looking to compete for the top spot in the DeFi sector.