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Avalanche’s activity spikes to over 1 million daily transactions

The rise in transactions is driven by stablecoin usage, with most of the growth coming from transfers under $10.

Sage D. Young

Avalanche’s network activity is growing in multitudes. 

The network’s primary blockchain recorded over 1.2 million transactions on Monday, a sharp rise from last year when the figure was ranging between 100,000 and 250,000 daily transactions, per data platform Artemis.  

Chains - Daily Transactions
Daily transactions on Avalanche's primary blockchain since June 2024. (Artemis)

The bulk of the transaction activity comes from stablecoins, according to a Tuesday report from blockchain analytics firm CoinMetrics, which stated, “Most of the growth stems from low-value transfers under $10, with the majority clustered in the $5-10 range.” 

avalanche passing 1 million daily transactions comes after the network’s December upgrade called Avalanche9000, the network’s largest since its mainnet rollout, which resulted in an over 90% reduction in transaction fees on the blockchain. It also included a number of improvements aimed at increasing decentralization and built-in regulatory compliance, per a blog post written by Avalanche developers. 

One driver of increased transactions in the year stems from smart contracts from decentralized exchange aggregators. In decentralized finance, liquidity is spread across several on-chain exchanges where the price of a cryptocurrency differs on each venue, but an aggregator helps traders find the best price by combining the fractured liquidity together. 

The launch of NFT game MapleStory Universe in May also may have boosted transaction activity. “The timing of MapleStory’s launch closely aligns with the rise in Avalanche C-Chain transactions and active addresses. While not definitively linked, the parallel increase in USDC transfer counts may reflect users onboarding into the ecosystem,” the report said. 

Luigi DOnorio DeMeo, chief strategy officer at Ava Labs, the firm developing Avalanche, pointed to meme coin trading as well. 

“Meme coin activity helps to bring in exogenous liquidity and onboard a certain retail audience,” DeMeo told Sherwood News. Meme coin trading “is a good initial funnel for users that can be subsequently introduced to all the gaming and DeFi happening on Avalanche,” he added.

Even though Avalanche is seeing a rise in transactions, the price of its native token, AVAX, has not had a similar growth trajectory. The cryptocurrency has dropped 8% in the last 24 hours and about 34% from last June.

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Hyperliquid reclaims all-time high

HYPE, the native token powering perpetuals exchange Hyperliquid and its underlying blockchain, rebounded to reclaim its all-time high previously set at the start of the month.

Treasury firms Hyperliquid Strategies and Hyperion DeFi have also rallied as the token increased double digits in the last 24 hours to trade as high as $76.70, rising past its record price set nearly two weeks ago, according to CoinGecko. In the interim between all-time highs, HYPE pulled back to around $53.

The token has several tailwinds, the first coming from ETF flows. Since their inception in May, HYPE ETFs have yet to record negative weekly outflows, posting a cumulative total net inflow of $171.8 million, per SoSoValue.

The second comes from Hyperliquid spending basically everything it earns in fees to buy HYPE, a mechanism embedded into the protocol’s codebase.

The venue’s buyback funding mechanism is set to add a new source of yield. Validators of the network activated “AQAv2,” which means stablecoin deployers will share about 90% of reserve yield revenue on their supply within the protocol.

Around $6.1 billion of Circle’s USDC resides in Hyperliquid, per DefiLlama. Accrual begins on August 26 and the first payment is made on October 3, the network announced in its Discord channel last week.

A substantial amount of capital is riding on different positions of HYPE. In total, a move down to under $53 would result in the liquidation nearly 1.8 million HYPE worth of leveraged long positions on the on-chain perps venue, or $131.7 million, data from CoinGlass shows. For the upside, a climb above $100 results in the liquidation of more than 3 million worth of leveraged HYPE short positions, or $221.5 million.

HYPE’s rebound to all-time high comes after Michael Selig, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, defended his agency’s decision to approve regulated perpetuals, or futures contracts without expiration dates, CNBC reported on Monday.

Last month, the CFTC approved bitcoin perpetual futures trading in the US through regulated prediction markets firm Kalshi and an affiliate of centralized exchange Coinbase.

“Perps are highly likely to become lightly regulated and thus approved in the US,” said David Pakman, head of venture investments at CoinFund.

“We expect to see perps for many different types of assets, from commodities to equities,” Pakman told Sherwood News.

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Crypto market snaps back as sentiment lifts, with altcoins from ethereum to XRP soaring

The market capitalization of the crypto industry has jumped around $83.2 billion in the last 24 hours, with privacy-focused token Zcash and worldcoin, the native cryptocurrency of the network backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, leading market gains, jumping over 22%.

But the last 24 hours have been good across the board:

Investors have been eager to see some positive signs around the Iranian conflict ending, coupled with hopeful outlooks around the CLARITY act, both breathing some life into assets, Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth told Sherwood News.

Simon Shockey, a crypto strategist at crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy, said the upswing stems from several things converging. He pointed to how alt markets broadly were very oversold following the bug found in Zcash that shook confidence.

Friday, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic didn’t find any more serious bugs with the Zcash protocol after Shielded Labs requested the AI firm run a security audit of the network with Mythos.

Shockey added that the pool of willing sellers has dwindled. Even if structurally, AI is a much more compelling and asymmetric bet in the eyes of allocators, many of these crypto assets have simply run out of marginal sellers despite some shorter-term narrative-driven pumps. The only people left to sell at this point are the teams themselves and VCs.

Net-net: oversold conditions plus exhausted seller bases plus a macro backdrop thats stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

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