AVAX Surges 30% as Avalanche Unveils $180M DeFi Incentive Program
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The Avalanche Foundation has announced a multi-million dollar decentralized finance incentive for onboarding “blue-chip DeFi applications.”
On Aug 18, the Avalanche Foundation unveiled a $180 million liquidity mining incentive program called “Avalanche Rush.” The initiative is designed to introduce more DeFi projects to its growing ecosystem.
It stated that the program will bring two of the largest DeFi protocols by total value locked, Aave and Curve, to launch on Avalanche. The first phase of the Rush program will launch shortly the platform’s native token, AVAX, as liquidity mining incentives for Aave and Curve users over a three-month period.
It added that the Foundation has allocated up to $20 million in AVAX tokens for Aave users and $7 million worth of tokens for Curve users. Additional allocations are planned for Phase 2 in the coming months, it stated.
A growing DeFi ecosystem
Avalanche launched on mainnet in September of 2020 as a high-speed blockchain and smart contracts platform boasting 4,500 transactions per second. In mid-May, the world’s most popular stablecoin, Tether, launched on Avalanche to offer a high-speed, low-cost alternative to ETH.
The new incentive follows the platform’s Avalanche Bridge launch, a next-generation cross-chain bridging technology that transfers assets between blockchains.
The announcement stated that combining the new liquidity mining incentive and the bridging technology provides strong liquidity incentives and a seamless user experience for established and emerging DeFi applications to join the ecosystem.
Aave founder Stani Kulechov said that it will be a big plus for Aave:
“Avalanche consensus is well suited for building DeFi applications due to its scalability features, particularly its high throughput and near-instant finality. The deployment of the Aave Protocol on Avalanche will allow users to leverage low transaction costs without compromising the security of the network,”
Emin Gün Sirer, director at the Avalanche Foundation, added “the combination of Aave, Curve, and Avalanche will create really interesting synergies that DeFi users will be excited about.”
The Foundation stated that it will continue adding blue-chip DeFi protocols to the platform but did not specify which ones or when.
AVAX token price outlook
The native AVAX token has surged in price in reaction to the new incentives. At the time of press, AVAX was trading up 30% on the day at $30.60 according to CoinGecko.
The DeFi token has made a monumental 200% over the past month but is still down 50% from its peak price of $59.40 on Feb 10.
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