Avalanche Watch: November Edition

What’s New on Avalanche

JP Morgan Creates Tokenization Proof-of-Concept on Avalanche - J.P. Morgan's Onyx and Apollo Global are collaborating on a tokenization proof-of-concept under the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s (MAS) Project Guardian. Their aim is to use blockchain, smart contracts, and tokenization methods to revolutionize asset and wealth management by incorporating alternative assets into portfolios. This initiative, leveraging Onyx Digital Assets and interfacing with platforms like Avalanche Evergreen Subnets, aims to automate and streamline portfolio management in a testnet environment. Read more here. 

Citi Tests Foreign Exchange Solution on Avalanche - CitiBank leveraged AvaCloud, Ava Lab’s custom blockchain service, to launch a foreign exchange solution that provides secure, real-time streaming of price quotes, simulated trade execution, and immutable records in a testnet environment. Read more here. 

Codebase by Avalanche - Avalanche's Codebase, a 12-week accelerator program for early-stage Web3 startups, opened applications for its first cohort starting in Spring 2024. The program offers a $50k stipend and the chance to win a $400k investment prize. Participants will receive comprehensive support from both Web3 experts and Web2 giants such as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. The program focuses on technical development, business operations, and marketing strategies to transform promising ideas into successful ventures. Read more here. 

Incoming Avalanche Platform Upgrades - Emin Gün Sirer, the CEO of Ava Labs, wrote on X that AvalancheGo is undergoing major performance optimizations. He expects these optimizations to reduce block processing times by as much as 90-95%, reduce time-to-finality to a few hundred milliseconds, and create a more capable network through powerful libraries and cross-chain communication protocols. Read more here.  

Avalanche Scales to Meet Spike in Inscriptions - In the last several months, Bitcoin ordinals (a tool for posting on-chain data often in the form of images), have risen in popularity and sent gas fees flying on the Bitcoin blockchain. Similar inscriptions were used by Avalanche’s ASC-20 tokens, causing gas fees and network demand to surge. Fortunately for Avalanche users, the network was able to scale with the sudden demand and process transactions at a peak of 97.64 transactions per second. 

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Frosty Metrics Launch! - Frosty Metrics, a new analytics platform for all things Avalanche, launched this month, powered by The Tie. Check it out here!

The Past Month in Decentralized Finance (DeFi)

Liquid Staking Token (LST) Protocols Seeing Explosive Growth in Total Value Locked - Since the beginning of October, BenQi, Avalanche's largest liquid staking protocol, has grown by (+131.4%) in USD-denominated TVL. GoGoPool and YieldYak have respectively seen TVL grow by (+157%) and (+119.7%) in the same period. A portion of this growth is related to the AVAX token’s appreciation in USD value over this period (+75.1%), especially because AVAX backs these liquid staking protocols. However, LST TVL growth has outpaced the appreciation of AVAX, pointing to specific interest in this vertical.   

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‍Balancer Reflects LST Boost in Trading Volume - Balancer is an automated market maker protocol that, among other things, facilitates the exchange of different liquid staking tokens. As liquid staking tokens are growing rapidly, the USD value of exchange of these tokens has also grown (+44.3%) from the beginning to end of November. 

Renewed Growth in Yield Farming Protocols - Established yield farming protocols Vector Finance and Beefy Finance have both seen considerable growth during November (+83.8% and +36.4% TVL, respectively). Cian Protocol, a protocol used to recursively loop staking yields then borrowing from lending protocols, has also seen tremendous growth with its sAVAX offering. The growth of second order products like Cian can help increase durable TVL in the ecosystem by driving demand for the underlying product. 

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Find more DeFi insights here. 

The Past Month in Gaming (GameFi) 

Steady Ranking of Top Avalanche Games - There has not been much movement in user activity for the existing set of games. DeFi Kingdoms remains the clear leader in unique addresses over the last 30 days.

Excitement Brews for Shrapnel - Long anticipated AAA shooter game Shrapnel released its SHRAP token this month, which has already seen considerable trading volume. Shrapnel is anticipated to release in December 2023 and can be found on the Epic Games Store. 

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Find more gaming insights here. 

The Past Month in Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs)

Data from Avalytics

Avalanche Has Wildly Successful November NFT sales - NFT sales on Avalanche saw a huge boom, especially on the new NFT marketplace Hyperspace AVAX. This result, in part, comes from incentives provided by the Avalanche Foundation for NFT trading. NFT volume over November totaled ~615,560 AVAX, which was + ~716% from the previous 30 days. Here are the results broken down by collection: 

1. Dokyo (515,446 AVAX) - In November, Dokyo became the highest traded NFT collection across all blockchains. Dokyo is a pfp collection of 5,555 NFTs that has taken the top traded spot on Avalanche NFTs since their release in October. 

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2. Mambonauts (18,321 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. 

3. Sausagers (16,937 AVAX) - A pfp collection of Sausagers. No buns. 

4. Chad Doge Supers (7,060 AVAX) - A pfp collection of upgraded Chad Doge NFTs. 

5. ferdy fish (6,264 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.

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Find more NFT insights here.

Project Spotlight

Movement in Testnet - Movement is an innovative subnet known for its flexibility, high throughput, security, and interoperability within the Avalanche ecosystem. Using Movement Lab’s Fractal Transpiler, developers can write smart contracts in the Move language that are also EVM compatible. This flexibility helps facilitate an easy onboarding process for Solidity developers, which make up a considerable share of smart contract developers. Furthermore, smart contracts written in Move benefit from Move’s reentrancy protection, ensuring the creation of more secure applications. Movement’s Layer 1 blockchain, M1, has a theoretical limit of 160,000 transactions per second, making it perfect for gaming and high-throughput use cases. Here is how different Move-based blockchains compare to the market incumbents. 

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