Avalanche Watch: January 2024

What’s New on Avalanche

Vryx Developing on the HyperSDK - Some blockchain builders are increasing throughput via decoupled state machine replication. Traditionally, block building, replication, and verification occur in synchronous order. Decoupled state machine replication allows for parts of these processes to run asynchronously and in parallel. Vryx is the implementation of a decoupled state replication machine for the HyperSDK, a toolkit created by Ava Labs for building customized high-throughput virtual machines. Learn more here. 

Teleporter Course Release on Avalanche Academy - Ava Labs released a new course on Teleporter, a cross-subnet communication protocol that is set to dramatically impact the value proposition of Avalanche. If you are interested in development on Avalanche, learn more here. 

Onigiri Subnet - The ONIGIRI Chain is a specialized public blockchain for food and healthcare. The project aims to revolutionize value creation by securely collecting and preserving data for use across finance, insurance, and healthcare. It also aims to introduce market-based pricing for food-related data with $ONGR. Furthermore, ONIGIRI Chain addresses the challenges of data duplication and loss in traditional systems by leveraging blockchain technology for decentralized data management. Read more here.

The Past Month in Decentralized Finance (DeFi)

Struct Finance Balloons in Total Value Locked - The Avalanche Foundation recently announced Struct Finance as a recipient of up to $1m USD in Avalanche Rush Incentives. Since the announcement, Struct Finance has seen a surge in total value locked, securing almost $4m USD in TVL. Struct Finance is a decentralized platform that offers structured financial products, similar to products found in traditional finance like asset-backed securities.

Thorchain Showing Strong Avalanche Growth  - Thorchain is a protocol with  > $283m USD in total value locked across 9 different blockchains. Thorchain facilitates native coin trading among these blockchains, including BTC, the most liquid crypto asset, and AVAX. Since the beginning of October, the amount of AVAX locked in Thorchain contracts has risen dramatically (+814%), increasing both the liquidity and utility of BTC and AVAX.

Volumes Across Major DEXs Remain Relatively Flat - Trader Joe maintains its position as the DEX of choice according to total volume, despite a slip in trade volumes.

TVL Leaders Remain Unchanged - BenQi sees a minor retraction in TVL, though levels remain relatively unchanged throughout the ecosystem.  

Find more DeFi insights here. 

The Past Month in Gaming (GameFi) 

TSM Blitz Subnet Now Live - Popular eSports team TSM just launched their new subnet that will be incorporated in hosting gaming tournaments. Read the announcement here. 

Tiltyard Launches First Playtest of Midnight Heist - Tiltyard, a new platform for online competitive gaming, just released a public test of their first game, Midnight Heist. Midnight Heist is a player vs. player strategy game that combines aspects of poker and role-playing games. 

Top Games by Unique Users Remain Largely Unchanged - 

Find more gaming insights here. 

The Past Month in Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs)

Successful NFT Mints in January and Increased NFT trading - January saw a considerable increase in Avalanche NFT volume sales. Overall NFT trading volumes are ~460% from the previous month. This increase in volume was in large part due to incentives on the Hyperspace NFT marketplace. Furthermore, Steady and Dokkaebi are two new NFT collections that saw considerable trading volumes in January. 

1. Dokyo (1,530,385 AVAX) - Dokyo has remained the most traded NFT collection on Avalanche, and continually reappears as the top traded NFT collection across all blockchains. 

2. Steady (150,226 AVAX) - Steady is a 2,500 piece PFP collection that prioritizes instilling a strong, fun, and original human element into digital identities. Steady launched in January and quickly sold out. 

3. Dokkaebi (56,320 AVAX) - Dokkaebi is a 3,333 piece PFP collection that highlights Korean culture through goblin-like depictions. Dokkaebi’s mint also sold out in January. 

4. Mambonauts (47,377 AVAX) - Mambonauts are the space-bound entry to the MamboMakers ecosystem. Holding one will give you access to whitelists and free mints (both from the MamboMakers team as well as collaborations) and giveaways. 

5. CoqVsHunter (20,957 AVAX) - CoqVsHunter NFTs play an important role in the Game-Fi experience “Coq vs. Hunter.” This collection is built on top of the $COQ ecosystem by the @CoqInuMiner team.

Find more NFT insights here.

Project Spotlight

ggAVAX holders now will receive MEV returns - GoGoPool’s ggAVAX token holders will now receive yield from Maximal Extracted Value (MEV). 

MEV is usually value captured by wealthy centralized entities that profit from manipulation of transaction ordering. Perhaps the most well-known form of MEV is the sandwich attack, where the MEV extractor sees a large order and places a transaction before and after the large order. The first transaction pushes the price higher for the large order, the large order buys less than intended, then the succeeding order places a sell order (now at a higher price), where the MEV extractor pockets profit. By distributing the rewards from MEV (which occurs on all public blockchains) to their token holders, GoGoPool hopes to democratize MEV rewards through organic market behavior.

GoGoPool is one of the fastest-growing liquid staking protocols on Avalanche. GoGoPool allows users to help secure the Avalanche network, participate in DeFi, and earn yield by holding the ggAVAX token.

Avalanche is an open, programmable smart contracts platform for decentralized applications. Avalanche has one of the fastest time-to-finality of any blockchain platform and is decentralized, interoperable between other app-chains within the Avalanche ecosystem, customizable, and inexpensive to use. 

Also check out Frosty Metrics for free data and follow @frostymetrics on X for the latest data-driven Avalanche insights!