Avalanche (AVAX) appears to be one of the few major cryptocurrencies to buck the recent crypto decline, posting a phenomenal 79% weekly gain as others have declined.
Some analysts believe this is due to recent partnership announcements and a rise in trading volumes and total value locked, while others claim there’s been a shift in how altcoins are valued.
While Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) saw a 6% nosedive on Dec. 11, AVAX gained 13.6% in the last 24 hours, per CoinGecko data.
Ryan Mcmillin, the chief investment officer at Merkle Tree Capital, told Cointelegraph that much of the excitement around AVAX could be due to traditional financial heavyweights JPMorgan and Citi partnering with the Avalanche Foundation for their real-world asset tokenization initiatives.
“More recently, the strength of AVAX looks to be associated with a spike in daily transactions from around $200,000 to $4.5 million over the last couple of days. Daily active addresses have also seen a solid trend to the upside,” Millin added.
The Avalanche network’s total value locked (TVL) has grown 82% from $490 million to $894 million in the past three months since Sept. 12, while AVAX token trading volume surged 2,436% in the same period, DefiLlama data shows.
“A few weeks ago, Avalanche had more TVL than, for example, Solana with a quarter of the market cap,” Andersson said. “TVL is still higher, but the market cap is now half that of Solana.”
“We do believe we will enter a market in 2024 where some of the altcoins will perform better than Bitcoin,” he added. He named Immutable (IMX) and Synethix (SNX) as tokens that had outperformed Bitcoin since 2022.
In a Dec. 11 crypto fund flows report, CoinShares head of research James Butterfill wrote that while majors such as Bitcoin and Ether suffered steep price declines this week, Solana (SOL) and Avalanche had seen inflows of $3 million and $2 million respectively, remaining “firm favorites” in the altcoin sector.