Avalanche Watch: July Edition

Avalanche

‍What’s New on Avalanche

Avalanche Vista - The Avalanche Foundation announced a fund of up to $50 million to purchase tokenized assets minted on the Avalanche blockchain. This initiative is a part of Ava Lab’s core mission to digitize the world's assets including equities, credit, real estate, and commodities. Tokenization could supercharge Avalanche DeFi by tapping into new markets. Learn more here.

Avalanche Academy - Ava Labs recently published training material and learning modules for the next wave of Avalanche developers. Current courses include Avalanche Fundamentals, Subnet Architecture, and Customizing the EVM (beta). Become an expert in the Avalanche Ecosystem, Virtual Machine Development, and Subnet Architecture at Avalanche Academy.

Bank of America Recognizes Avalanche as a Platform Powering the Future of Trading/Value Transfer - In a recent report on Global Digital Assets by Bank of America, Avalanche was noted as a platform powering the future of trading/value transfer. Read the full report here.

Core Stake - Core, a product suite developed by Ava Labs, just released Core Stake, the go-to tool for validating and delegating on the Avalanche network. With a minimum of 25 AVAX, users can delegate their AVAX to secure the network and earn AVAX. Learn more about Core Stake here.

‍Decentralized Sequencing - NodeKit, a company building a shared sequencer called SEQ, announced they are building SEQ on an Avalanche Subnet. SEQ aims to reduce potential downtime issues, censorship concerns, and performance issues in Ethereum scaling. Learn more here.

The Past Month in Decentralized Finance (DeFi)

Avalanche the FX Chain - EUROC, a euro-backed stablecoin issued by Circle, is now deployed natively on Ethereum and Avalanche after the Avalanche EUROC launch on June 24. Ethereum has a stablecoin market capitalization of $66.7b with EUROC accounting for $50.9m (0.076%). Comparatively, Avalanche has a stablecoin market cap of $1.27b with a EUROC market cap of $2.33m (0.18%). Proportional to their respective stablecoin markets, the Avalanche EUROC stablecoin market cap is 2.36x that of Ethereum. This heightened relative use could be due to the inexpensive fees on Avalanche and support for EUROC on Avalanche DeFi protocols (e.g. Trader Joe, Dexalot, CablesFinance, and Uniswap), and is suggestive of a narrative described by Ava Labs’ head of DeFi Luigi D'Onorio DeMeo – that Avalanche is poised to become the “FX Chain”.

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BenQi dominating Liquid Staking Market - The liquid staking token (also known as liquid staking derivative or LST/LSD) market is rapidly expanding across blockchains. The primary function of LSTs is to lower the barrier to entry for staking, and to unlock capital that would otherwise be locked in staking. The LST market on Avalanche is largely dominated by BenQi and their LST token sAVAX. Although BenQi dominates the market, it has not shown the same growth in the past month as its competitors GoGoPool (+38.1%) and YieldYak (+18.7%).

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Trader Joe Continues DEX Market Dominance - Trader Joe continues its long-running reign as the largest DEX on Avalanche. Along with announcing an expansion to Ethereum, Trader Joe also improved the fee efficiencies of their stableswap pools in July. See the spotlight section below for an in-depth look at the Uniswap launch.

BenQi becomes Top TVL Project on Avalanche - Aave saw a withdrawal in TVL on Avalanche during the launch of Aave’s GHO stablecoin on Ethereum. Some of the liquidity locked in Aave on Avalanche may have been pulled to Ethereum to mint GHO. At the same time, BenQi saw a brief surge in deposits as the project exceeded 7m staked AVAX.

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The Past Month in Gaming (GameFi)

DeFi Kingdoms Dominates Active GameFi Wallets - DeFi Kingdoms continues expanding its monthly active wallet count. This past month, DeFi Kingdoms released new features: combat testing grounds and bazaar. The combat testing grounds provide a more familiar gaming experience to those not integrated in DeFi, and the bazaar is an on-chain orderbook perfect for trading low-liquidity items. Of the other Avalanche GameFi applications, Crypto Royale has the greatest growth rate in the last 30 days with over 1,200 active wallets last month.

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The Past Month in Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs)

NFT sales on Avalanche saw a month-on-month decrease of 30%. The top 5 collections by volume were:

Chikn (2754 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.
Ferdy Fish (1653 AVAX) - A collection of 300 NFTs, Ferdy Fish is a PFP project with a strong community and connection to ferdyflip.xyz, a collection of games that use Chainlink’s verifiable randomness functions.
The Salvors (1421 AVAX) - A pfp project of Salvors that set sail for the open ocean, determined to achieve their objectives despite the obstacles and perils ahead.
Peons V2 (607 AVAX) - A Joe Studios collection that showcases the second era of Rich Peon Poor Peon. The original collection was the fifth best selling collection last month on Joepegs, Avalanche’s largest NFT Marketplace.
Dragon Crypto Hero (603 AVAX) - An NFT avatar that is required to play The Legend of Aurum Draconis. The higher the avatar’s rank, the more starting stats the player gets to spend.

Project Spotlight - Uniswap V3

Uniswap off to a Strong Start - Uniswap V3, an industry standard decentralized exchange (DEX), launched on Avalanche. The new Avalanche deployment is off to a strong start with over $3m in total value locked, and the DEX recently peaked around $7m in daily volume. The Avalanche deployment comes on the heels of the announcement of Uniswap V4, which introduces “hooks” or smart contracts that run at various points of a pool’s action lifecycle. This new architecture could allow for new levels of customization, but V4 is not yet live.

About Avalanche

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