Avalanche Launches  $220m ‘Blizzard’ Fund, Set To Boost DeFi & NFTs

The Avalanche Foundation, the principal organization behind the development of the Avalanche blockchain, has launched a new $220 million fund aimed at supporting the growth of decentralized finance, enterprise apps, NFTs, and culture applications.

The fund has been named ‘Blizzard’ and is created to support emerging use cases such as security token issuances, liquidity providers, and self-sovereign identity. According to the Avalanche Foundation, several distinguished venture capital firms have pooled together to contribute to the fund, among them are Ava Labs, Polychain Capital, Three Arrows Capital and Dragonfly Capital.

“A fund dedicated to supporting and cultivating innovation on Avalanche is a massive step in the maturation of the Avalanche ecosystem. It has investment from some of the largest, and most strategic investors in this space who have strong track records of building value within communities.” shares John Wu, current president of Ava Labs.

The new fund follows Avalanche’s $180 million DeFi incentive program, which was announced earlier in August this year, which in turn follows the release of its Avalanche Bridge for cross-blockchain asset transfers.

The program, Avalanche Rush, has boosted the network significantly, which has now handled roughly 18.5 million transactions. Avalanche’s $AVAX token, on the other hand, has tripled in price since the launch of Avalanche Rush, going from $21 to $63 on the open market. Avalanche is fairly new, having been launched sometime in September last year, but it already has over 320 projects building on its decentralized platform. Avalanche supports DeFi projects such as Chainlink, Tether, SushiSwap, Circle, and The Graph. Avalanche also supports over 1,000 validator nodes for token staking modules.

With Blizzard, Avalanche is strategically poised to bolster user activity and adoption by supporting new projects and applications for its ecosystem.

“There’s still so much untapped potential in the blockchain ecosystem, including use cases that haven’t been possible with transaction finality in the range of 15 to 60 seconds, rather than near-instant as you see on Avalanche. By supporting all of these projects, Blizzard is positioned to enrich the Avalanche user experience today, but it also has the potential to fund the next great culture or gaming application that breaks into the mainstream.” Wu explains.

According to Avalanche, the protocol has recently claimed new milestones in terms of user activity, with over 500,000 unique addresses, and over $5.2 billion worth of assets transferred from Ethereum through the Avalanche Bridge. Avalanche’s TVL (total value locked) across its decentralized ecosystem has now reached $8.4 billion, from the mere $312 million that it  locked in since August. The protocol’s native token, $AVAX, is currently priced at roughly $65 for spot trades, with a market capitalization of around $14.3 billion, ranking 14th across the crypto space.

Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.