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- Bitcoin has been trading below $50,000 for a while now and traders have started exploring altcoins that could generate great returns in the short term.
- Several analysts have pointed to Avalanche as the best alternative, saying it looks set to take the Solana implosion route.
Bitcoin is trading at $42,000 at press time, down 10 percent in the past week. This is despite the never-ending bullish sentiments from traders who believe BTC will end the year north of $100,000. However, in the short term, traders could be best served by exploring other alternatives, and Avalanche has piqued the interest of many analysts who believe it’s due for a breakout and could be ‘the next Solana.’
Why Avalanche (AVAX) is exciting analysts
Avalanche is a layer 1 proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain network that supports smart contracts. The project has managed to solve some of the most pressing blockchain challenges, including having a high throughput of over 4,500 transactions per second and full compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine. It’s based on the Byzantine fault tolerance protocol and launched in September 2020.
AVAX, which is the native token on the Avalanche network, is one of the cryptocurrencies that many analysts believe will soar in the near future. And in the past two months, these projections have been justified, with AVAX shooting up an incredible 700 percent.
For one, Avalanche is seeing great capital flow. And for layer 1 protocols, this is extremely crucial to the performance of their tokens.
(Layer 1 networks are underlying blockchain architecture, while Layer 2 are overlaying networks that lie on top of them to improve certain aspects such as throughput. Think of Bitcoin and the Lightning Network, which are Layer 1 and Layer 2 respectively).
The capital flow into the Avalanche ecosystem is similar to that seen in Solana a few months back, one analyst has pointed out. Boosted by this, Solana would soar to great heights, and the pseudonymous analyst Strong Hedge believes AVAX is next.
If you’ve been around long enough, the answers lie in the charts. Here is what they are telling me:
– Money is rotating from one ecosystem to the next. $SOL was first, $ATOM & $AVAX is currently benefiting.
– $BTC is doing nothing but chop, but look how the majority of alts
— $trong (@StrongHedge) September 19, 2021
Lex Moskovski, the chief investment officer at Moskovski Capital is also of similar persuasion about AVAX. He recently took to Twitter to claim:
[AVAX] is behaving like [Solana] at $25 showing impressive resilience and frontrunning orders.
Solana would go on to shoot above $210, a new record, and break into the top ten where it currently sits 7th at a $38 billion market cap.
Attracting major projects, developers and users
Even more bullish for Avalanche is the constant development that is aimed at making it the better alternative to many of today’s Layer 1 networks. To embark on these developments, the Avalanche Foundation raised $230 million in a private sale of its AVAX tokens to venture capital firms led by Polychain Capital and Three Arrows Capital. The sale happened in June but the foundation only revealed it a week ago.
Already, Avalanche is the fastest smart contracts platform, measured by time-to-finality. In addition, its Ethereum Virtual Machine compatibility means it’s quite easy to port applications from Avalanche to Ethereum, and vice versa.
These developments, the robust ecosystem and the high number of users are already attracting major projects which are deploying applications on the network. The latest is Kyber Network which launched its automated market maker on Avalanche in the past week. Kyber has already launched its so-called dynamic market maker on other major chains including Ethereum, Polygon and Binance Smart Chain.
When asked about why deploy on Avalanche, Loi Luu, the Kyber Network CEO, stated:
We’re going after the users, so at the end of the day, whichever ecosystem has the growing community, we’re going to be there.
And it’s not just the major projects that are coming to Avalanche. Ordinary users and developers are also increasingly favoring the network.
For developers, one of the best ways of assessing interest in a project is through GitHub commits. Avalanche saw over 12,500 commits since its launch. This puts it at the top alongside other major projects like IOTA and Cardano.
For the users, the continued rise in total value locked is one of the best indicators, and the project has shown impressive growth. According to data by DefiLlama, there’s $2.73 billion in TVL on Avalanche, with Benqi at $1.14 billion the most dominant platform in the ecosystem. Polygon is at $3.93 billion while Fantom is at $1.12 billion.
What’s on the pipeline?
According to Patrick Sutton, the director of communications at Ava Labs, there’s much more in store for Avalanche. Ava Labs contributes to the development of Avalanche in much the same way that the Ethereum Foundation does for Ethereum.
In a recent interview, Patrick revealed that the “tooling that supports users on Avalanche is undergoing a massive overhaul to provide a better user experience for the whole spectrum of user sophistication and knowledge.”
On what’s in the pipeline, he revealed:
Performance enhancements to the core platform, more applications, a better Avalanche Wallet, more cross-chain connectivity with the Avalanche Bridge, entirely new asset classes like Initial Litigation Offerings, enhanced subnet capability, on and on and on.
At press time, AVAX is trading just above $62, having gained 19 percent in the past seven days. Analysts predict that it’s only a matter of time before the token breaks past $100. In the past 30 days, it also had the best risk-return ratio of all major cryptocurrencies, far outpacing the likes of Luna, Solana and ATOM.
