Amid a sea of red in crypto markets today Avalanche is bucking the trend, gaining 130% since the start of the month to reach a new all-time high of US$146.22 and leaping over Dogecoin to enter the crypto top 10. This clears that list of memecoins for the first time since Dogecoin’s historic run in mid-April, according to data from CoinMarketCap. Avalanche was trading at US$132.03 at press time.
Fast facts
- This is part of a longer tear for Avalanche’s token AVAX which really began in early August when it was only trading at US$20. A few key events have helped boost AVAX’s price in the latter half of this year: a US$230 million investment into the Avalanche ecosystem in September brought the price up to the US$70 mark, while last week consulting giant and Big Four accounting firm Deloitte announced a partnership with Avalanche to build a platform to reduce disaster recovery red tape on the blockchain.
- Meanwhile Doge has continued its descent from a monthlong high of around the US$0.30 mark from late October, steadily losing ground ever since, and was trading around US$0.22 at press time. This is a far cry from the sudden and short-lived explosion in price when it reached its all-time high of US$0.7376 in July after a surge of interest helped create the idea of the memecoin — a token whose price is based almost entirely on its popularity as an online joke.
- This strong price action for Avalanche comes as a heated debate unfolded on crypto Twitter over the weekend between advocates of Ethereum — the world’s second-biggest blockchain — and proponents of other altcoins, including Avalanche. In short, the “Ethereum abandoners” were arguing that the Ethereum ecosystem had grown too large and was focused on pumping ETH at the expense of keeping gas fees low enough to create an inclusive ecosystem. Meanwhile, Ethereum advocates said some trading firms are only promoting altcoins or “Ethereum Killers” as a “pump and dump” scheme and that many of these alternatives sacrifice decentralization for scale.
- The debate was sparked when Kain Warwick of Synthetix tweeted on Friday: “A lot of people I respected earlier in this cycle have sold out in pursuit of profit maximisation, chasing opportunistic gains at the expense of their reputation, remember this when they all coming flooding back into the Ethereum ecosystem once L2 scaling becomes inevitable.”
- A detailed report of the whole argument can be found in the most recent newsletter by Bankless.
- Meanwhile, the world’s largest cryptocurrency by market cap, Bitcoin, was trading down around 7% for the past week at US$57,027 at press time, according to CoinMarketCap.