Avalanche Watch: August Edition

Avalanche

‍What’s New on Avalanche

Teleporter in Testnet - Teleporter, a new cross-chain messaging protocol built on Avalanche Warp Messaging, is now live on the Avalanche testnet. Teleporter provides a native way to call contracts on other EVM blockchains along with replay protection, message retries, and incentives for message delivery. It is an especially important development considering that the C-Chain, an EVM blockchain, is the liquidity hub of the Avalanche ecosystem. Once Teleporter is released, Subnets will have a native way to access the C-Chain, which could be a key catalyst for the growth of DeFi on Avalanche. Learn more here.

Multidimensional fees - The HyperSDK now utilizes five independent parameters to determine user fees instead of the standard unidimensional fee structure: bandwidth, compute, and three storage components: read, create, and modify. This new fee structure provides accurate resource metering to efficiently increase the throughput of HyperSDK blockchains. Learn more here.

Dexalot receives up to $3m in Multiverse Progam - Dexalot, a central limit order book decentralized exchange deployed on its own ALOT subnet, just received a grant of up to $3m from the Avalanche Multiverse program. Avalanche’s Multiverse fund will be distributed over 12 months through the Dexalot Incentive Program, which rewards Dexalot users with the subnet native token, ALOT, for trading on the platform. Since launch, the ALOT subnet has processed over 12m transactions. Learn more here.

GMX releases v2 Beta - A new version release of the largest perpetual exchanges by TVL on Avalanche, GMX, enables a series of new features including an expanded set of tradable assets, multiple collateral types, faster execution speeds and lower slippage, and isolated pools. On the chart below, you can see that V2 is growing in trading volume, though V1 remains the preferred choice for GMX users.

Zero One - Zero One, an experimental platform where artists can collect 10 editions of other artwork upon minting one piece of their own, just released on the Avalanche C-Chain. Zero One aims to democratize art distribution by creating a marketplace of artists and collectors. Learn more here and check out zeroone.art

The Past Month in Decentralized Finance (DeFi)

Balancer & Uniswap Started Strong on Avalanche - Balancer and Uniswap are both established protocols on other chains that recently deployed on Avalanche. Since deployment, Uniswap is now one of the top DEXs by total volume, and Balancer is also seeing considerable growth. The largest Uniswap pools consist of a wide variety of assets including stableswaps of large-cap stablecoins and wrapped ETH and AVAX pairings. The largest Balancer pools on Avalanche consist of liquid staking tokens like sAVAX, ggAVAX, and yyAVAX paired with wrapped AVAX (WAVAX), increasing liquidity for these assets.

Trader Joe Remains Most Popular DEX by a Wide Margin - Trader Joe has continued its market dominance on Avalanche with continuous innovations. These include a new algorithm for auto-pools with V2 of “The General” that interprets more data and offers a more diverse set of decisions during rebalancing, new auto-pools for WETH-AVAX, BTC-AVAX, and EUROC-USDC, and a deployment on Ethereum mainnet.

Total Value Locked Slightly Declines in August - Avalanche saw a 16.7% decline in total value locked across a basket of the largest DeFi protocols. On August 22, Balancer announced there was a vulnerability affecting their V2 pools that affected 1.4% of total TVL in the protocol. This may have contributed to the overall decline in TVL across Avalanche, especially since TVL leaders Aave and BenQi use Balancer pools. In particular, BenQi’s sAVAX-WAVAX is the one of the largest Balancer pools that may have experienced withdrawals as a result of the vulnerability.

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The Past Month in Gaming (GameFi)

Off The Grid releases first gameplay trailer - Off The Grid is a new battle royale third-person shooter directed by Neill Blomkamp (District 9) that will be hosted on an Avalanche Subnet. See IGN’s tweet about it here.

DeFi Kingdoms Continues GameFi Dominance - DeFi Kingdom continues to maintain popularity with over 100,000 active sender wallets interacting with DeFi Kingdoms smart contracts. Overall GameFi usage on Avalanche remains largely unchanged.

The Past Month in Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs)

NFT sales on Avalanche saw a strong month for top collections. Compared to July, August saw nearly twice as much NFT transaction volume (+94.11%). The top 5 collections by volume were:

Ferdy Fish (6529 AVAX) - A collection of 300 NFTs, Ferdy Fish is a PFP project with a strong community and connection to ferdyflip.xyz, a collection of casino games that use Chainlink’s verifiable randomness functions. In August, the ferdyflip.xyz platform peaked at over $125k in volume in a single day.
Chikn (4823 AVAX) - An upgradable NFT collection used by the Chikn NFT gaming ecosystem. Chikn recently launched its new game called Coq Fight that allows players to battle each other through upgradable and tradeable NFTs.
The Salvors (844 AVAX) - a pfp project of Salvors that set sail for the open ocean, determined to achieve their objectives despite the obstacles and perils ahead.
Smol Joes: The Expansion (824 AVAX) - A second collection of the Smol Joes, which will eventually have customizable items and grant access to exclusive events.
SwolPepes (642 AVAX) - A collection of 300 Swol Pepes are joining the Swol Paradise ecosystem. For every two Swol Pepes a user holds, they receive one revenue share, from their 3 Gamblefi dApps.

Narrative Spotlight

DeltaPrime and Struct Finance Dominated Traunched Yield Farming - Both DeltaPrime and Struct finance offer traunched yield farming offerings. While both projects offer a lower risk, more predictable way to harvest yield, Delta Prime allows investors to take on up to 5x leverage with a select integrated basket of strategies like liquidity provision and yield farming in GMX, Pangolin, and Trader Joe. Struct Finance, on the other hand, offers variable risk structured products, similar to what one would find in an ETF or other baskets of variable risk assets. In August, Struct Finance’s TVL grew by 73.4% despite a difficult August for other DeFi protocols.

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Avalanche Watch is a data-driven monthly report covering major news and trends in the Avalanche ecosystem, powered by data and analytics from The Tie.

About Avalanche

Avalanche is a smart contracts platform that scales infinitely and regularly finalizes transactions in less than one second. Its novel consensus protocol, Subnet infrastructure, and HyperSDK toolkit enable Web3 developers to easily launch powerful, custom blockchain solutions. Build anything you want, any way you want, on the eco-friendly blockchain designed for Web3 devs.