Despite very difficult market conditions during the past few days, $AVAX has been enjoying bullish price action thanks to the arrival of Circle’s highly popular stablecoin USD Coin ($USDC) on Avalanche.
What is Avalanche ($AVAX)?
Below is a brief description of Avalanche from its developer documentation:
“Avalanche is an open-source platform for launching decentralized applications and enterprise blockchain deployments in one interoperable, highly scalable ecosystem. Avalanche is the first decentralized smart contracts platform built for the scale of global finance, with near-instant transaction finality. Ethereum developers can quickly build on Avalanche as Solidity works out-of-the-box.
“A key difference between Avalanche and other decentralized networks is the consensus protocol. Over time, people have come to a false understanding that blockchains have to be slow and not scalable. The Avalanche protocol employs a novel approach to consensus to achieve its strong safety guarantees, quick finality, and high-throughput without compromising decentralization.
“AVAX is the native token of Avalanche. It’s a hard-capped, scarce asset that is used to pay for fees, secure the platform through staking, and provide a basic unit of account between the multiple subnets created on Avalanche. 1 nAVAX is equal to 0.000000001 AVAX.“
Avalanche is being developed by Ava Labs, a blockchain startup founded in Brooklyn, New York in 2018 by Professor Emin Gün Sirer (CEO), who does computer science research at Cornell University, Kevin Sekniqi (COO), and Ted Yin (Chief Protocol Architect).
$USDC Launches on Avalanche
On Tuesday (December 14), FinTech firm Circle, which is the principal operator of USD Coin ($USDC), announced “native support for USDC on the Avalanche public blockchain- an eco-friendly, decentralized smart contracts platform empowering the next generation of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) with low fees and near-instant finality.”
The press release went on to say that “with more than $40B USDC in circulation as of December 2021, USDC is the world’s fastest-growing dollar digital currency and that “the integration will create more seamless transaction and payment options for developers and participants in Avalanche’s exponentially growing, interconnected ecosystem of DeFi protocols, enterprise applications, NFT marketplaces, and more.”
Customers will be able to “deposit, withdraw, send and receive payments, and settle transactions with USDC on Avalanche.” And Developers are now able to “take advantage of Circle’s suite of developer APIs, which have been updated to support USDC on Avalanche.”
Jeremy Allaire, CEO and Co-founder of Circle, had this to say:
“Support for USDC on Avalanche comes at an exciting and pivotal moment for the growing, multi-billion dollar DeFi market. With USDC as the leading dollar digital currency for the decentralized economy, this integration will be instrumental for developers and communities looking to participate in one of the fastest, organically growing ecosystems in crypto.“
$AVAX’s Price Action
According to data by TradingView, on cryopto exchange Coinbase, shortly before Circle’s announcement, $AVAX was trading around $78.49 and and at the time of writing it is trading around $110.87, which means that it is up 41.25% since then.
Disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed by the author, or any people mentioned in this article, are for informational purposes only, and they do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice. Investing in or trading cryptoassets comes with a risk of financial loss.
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Featured Image by “_anaposa_” via Pixabay
