Avalanche Watch: May 2024

What’s New on Avalanche

Icebreaker Program will Bring 500K AVAX to Ecosystem - The Avalanche Foundation has introduced the Icebreaker Program to bolster the growth and stability of the Avalanche ecosystem by supporting new and existing projects, particularly through liquid staking tokens. The initial phase will distribute up to 500,000 AVAX to select projects, with ongoing assessments and future expansions planned to further enhance the ecosystem. Read more here. 

New Avalanche Community Proposal 77 may Change the Future of Avalanche - ACP 77 is a community proposal to change the Avalanche network's subnet creation and management processes to increase flexibility and reduce costs for validators. The key goals include removing the high AVAX deposit requirement for validators, and implementing a new fee mechanism on the P-Chain to ensure security and scalability. Read more here.

New Tool Emerges for Safe Community Coins - Ignite.meme is a new tool for community members to launch their own memecoins. Ignite endeavors to ensure the safety of all created tokens, preventing rug pulls by having coins launched on their platform be part of a fair launch with no presales and no team allocations. Visit the platform here. 

Tokenization Expands to Fine Wine on Avalanche - The Wine Capital Fund has partnered with Oasis Pro and Avalanche to tokenize fine wine, transforming it into a more accessible and investable asset class. This collaboration leverages Avalanche's blockchain technology to enhance transparency, accessibility, and potential liquidity for investors in the fine wine market. Read more here. 

In May Avalanche:

• surpassed 20.5M Total Addresses,
• 924m in total value locked,
• had 1,820 validators, and 
• 44 active subnets on Mainnet according to snowpeer.io.

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The Past Month in Decentralized Finance (DeFi)

Stablejack Takes over Platypus - Stablejack, an Avalanche-native stablecoin, has acquired the platypus platform. Platypus was a single-sided automated market maker for pegged assets like stablecoins. Stablecoin’s acquisition of Platypus will allow Stablejack to swap their stablecoin, aUSD, with other supported stablecoins. 

Avalanche Sees Lower Month/Month trading volume in May - 

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Total Value Locked Increases Slightly - Increased total value locked in May was led primarily by deposits into Aave, the popular borrowing and lending service, and BenQi, the leading liquid staking protocol on Avalanche by TVL.

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The Past Month in Gaming (GameFi) 

New Gaming Network Coming to Avalanche - Gamestarter has partnered with Ava Labs to launch GameChain, a gaming-focused Layer 1 blockchain built on the Avalanche network. This new platform aims to simplify blockchain integration for game developers, enhance community engagement, and support a robust ecosystem with over 50 upcoming game projects. Read more here. 

DeFi Kingdoms Continues to Process High Volumes of Transactions - DFK Chain processes hundreds of thousands of transactions per day after the release of its new battle mechanics and new classes. 

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The Past Month in Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs)

Salvor Receives Avalanche Foundation Grant - Salvor, a peer-to-peer NFT and memecoin lending protocol on the Avalanche C-Chain, has received a $1M incentive grant from the Avalanche Rush Program. This grant will support Salvor in enhancing liquidity by allowing users to leverage NFTs and memecoins as collateral for AVAX loans, promoting a more accessible and flexible financial ecosystem.

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Top NFT Collections - The total NFT sales volume in May was 207,466 AVAX, a 69.2% decrease from April. Top traded NFT collections are as follows: 

1. Dokyo (91,800 AVAX) - Dokyo has remained the most traded profile picture NFT collection on Avalanche. Dokyo was the genesis collection for Avalanche’s most popular NFT platform Hyperspace. 

2. Long Long (55,500 AVAX) - Based on mythical folk lore of the Chinese Culture, The Jade Emperor organized The Heavenly Gate Race where the first 12 animals that passes the gate will earn a spot as the Jade Emperor's guard. On top of that each year will be named after the winners in sequence. Of all creatures, the Dragon was expected to win the race due to its ability to fly. During the race however, the Dragon stopped multiple times to help villagers who were in need of help causing the Dragon to place 5th in The Heavenly Gate Race ranking.

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3. BabySkullz (6,200 AVAX) 500 BabySkullz were created through stochastic generation.

4. Steady (2,900 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.

5. Chikn (1,040 AVAX) - Chikn is an ecosystem for interactive, upgradable, and gamified NFTs. 

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Project Spotlight - Frosty Metrics

Frosty Metrics rolled out a new feature called Chill Factor that measures a wallet's engagement score with the Avalanche ecosystem. The Chill Factor has already been used to distribute at least one ecosystem airdrop through Core App’s new airdrop tool:

Chill Factor considers three primary variables:

- engagement level as a factor of number of transactions, total gas paid, unique days of interaction

- breadth of user interaction that considers interactions with unique tokens, NFT collections, and contracts

- sustained engagement as measured by the number of consecutive months of activity

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