Avalanche Watch: October Edition

Avalanche

Avalanche Watch is a data-driven monthly report covering major news and trends in the Avalanche ecosystem, powered by data and analytics from The Tie.

In this report, we will cover major news announcements, platform upgrades, projects, network performance, and more!

What’s New on Avalanche

New Forex Markets on Avalanche - Across various cryptocurrency networks, USD denominated stablecoins have found product market fit with a market cap of around $125b. Protocols like Xave, Canza Finance, and VNX are bringing a portion of an estimated $6.6t in Forex markets on-chain, enhancing liquidity and accessibility of local and national currencies like EURC, VEUR, VCHF, BRZ and others. Read more about Canza here.

Chainlink Functions & Chainlink Automation Launches on the C-Chain - Chainlink Automation 2.0 and Chainlink Functions 1.0 have been launched on Avalanche C-Chain, offering the ecosystem sophisticated off-chain computation capabilities, including a decentralized serverless platform for connecting smart contracts to external data and running custom computations. These enhancements not only bolster security and configuration flexibility, but also establish new avenues for dApp interconnectivity and efficiency. Read more here.

Ava Labs Introduces Firewood - Ava Labs announced Firewood, a state-of-the-art database under active development that is designed for storing Merklized blockchain state. Firewood’s goal is to use efficient state management to address the scaling bottleneck that many blockchains face. Specifically, Firewood aims to improve storage by cleaning up obsolete state in-place and optimizing for Trie-structures. Learn more here.

Avalanche Community Proposals Spark Interest in New Tokenomics Design - Avalanche recently released a framework for improving the Avalanche network through written community proposals. One such proposal, Avalanche Community Proposal 13, proposed by Patrick O'Grady at Ava Labs, sparked conversations surrounding a redesign of Avalanche tokenomics to make Avalanche friendlier to new startup businesses. If accepted, this proposal would reduce the hardware requirements to become a validator and implement a new pay-as-you-go model for subnet security. You can read more about this ACP here.

Disrupting the Insurance and Reinsurance Markets - The Tie, the leading information services provider for digital assets, released the second episode of The Tie Builder Series, with the CEOs of Re and Cerchia. Re is reimagining the reinsurance industry by bringing transparency and efficiency to a traditionally opaque industry through an open marketplace. Cerchia uses DeFi rails to create a direct risk transfer marketplace. This marketplace connects investors and insurance purchasers, benefiting both parties through tokenized treasury funds. Listen to the X spaces here.

The Past Month in Decentralized Finance (DeFi)

Delta Prime Seeing Considerable Growth - Delta Prime, a protocol that provides borrowers access to undercollateralized loans, grew at a rapid pace in September and October (+32.5% in total value locked). Delta Prime gives users a trustless way to take long or short leverage through established Avalanche protocols like Yield Yak and Vector Finance.

Volumes up Across Avalanche DEXs; Trader Joe Outperforms - DEX trading volumes on Avalanche in October nearly doubled vs. September levels (+97.6%). This represents a disproportionate growth in volume relative to the broader DeFi market, where there are also signals of renewed DeFi adoption; Ethereum DEX trading volume was up +35.4% in October.

Of the top DEXs by volume, Trader Joe maintains its majority share. WooFi also stood out as surpassing popular protocols such as GMX and Uniswap. Dexalot rounds out the top 5 list.

Top Avalanche Protocols see Considerable TVL Growth - Similarly to trading volume, TVL for major projects has recently grown on Avalanche. From the start of September, BenQi’s TVL has grown 22.8%, Aave’s TVL grew 11.9%, and Trader Joe’s TVL grew 13%. The movement of capital back into the largest protocols on Avalanche could signal renewed market confidence in liquid staking, lending, and exchanging on Avalanche.

The Past Month in Gaming (GameFi)

Big Name Gamers Debut “Off the Grid” - Major gaming Youtubers including Dr. Disrespect, Clix, and ImperialHal demoed gameplay of an upcoming game called “Off The Grid'' created by Gunzilla Games. Off the Grid will be on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC with all gaming consoles connecting to the Gunzilla Subnet. See their gameplay here.

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Crypto Royale Sees Influx of Users - Crypto Royale saw the largest change in user base in October, moving from around 60 daily users to 1000. Castle Crush, a web 2.5 mobile game, also became the second most played Avalanche game by daily unique users, while Chikn saw a particularly strong month in NFT sales (listed below).

The Past Month in NFTs

Data from Avalytics as of November 9th

NFT sales volume declined 18.22% month-on-month after one of the strongest months of Avalanche NFT sales in September. Despite the decline, NFT sales remained strong, amassing a total of 77,202 AVAX in the past month. This NFT rush was bolstered by the release of Dokyo and incentives from the Avalanche Foundation for NFT traders on avax.hyperspace.xyz. Here are the top collections:

Dokyo (35,190 AVAX) - A relatively new NFT project launched on Hyperspace AVAX. All 5,555 mints were fulfilled, and Dokyo became one of the most traded collections by volume in Avalanche’s history.
Chikn (4,355 AVAX) - An upgradable NFT collection used by the Chikn NFT gaming ecosystem. Chikn recently launched its new game called Coq Fight that allows players to battle each other through upgradable and tradeable NFTs.
Doggerinos (3833 AVAX) - A profile picture collection of cartoon dogs. Doggerinos are an established Avalanche project and are eligible for trading rewards on avax.hyperspace.xyz.
ferdy fish (2176 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. In August, the ferdyflip.xyz platform peaked at over $125k in volume in a single day.
Ripperz (1724 AVAX) - Neoexpressionist glitch art on AVAX. Ripperz have been a popular NFT project for some time and they are eligible for trading rewards on avax.hyperspace.xyz.

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Project Spotlight - UPTN

UPTN Subnet Seeing Adoption Through Dreamus - Dreamus, a leading entertainment events and streaming service and a subsidiary of tech giant SK Planet, has integrated with the Avalanche blockchain to enhance ticketing experiences and maintain its dominance in South Korea's $230M concert ticket market. The 21 million users of Dreamus' ticketing app, OK Cashbag, can easily purchase tickets on the UPTN subnet, benefiting from enhanced digital transactions, protection against scalping, and counterfeit ticket prevention. The UPTN subnet saw rapid growth in active addresses and transaction counts at the end of October. Learn more here.

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About Avalanche

Avalanche is a smart contracts platform that scales infinitely and regularly finalizes transactions in less than one second. Its novel consensus protocol, Subnet infrastructure, and HyperSDK toolkit enable Web3 developers to easily launch powerful, custom blockchain solutions. Build anything you want, any way you want, on the eco-friendly blockchain designed for Web3 devs.