Avalanche’s native coin, AVAX, has reached US$29.3 (AU$42.5), a 6.6% increase in the last 24 hours.
Looking at the bigger picture, AVAX has experienced a nice surge of 30% in the monthly chart and over 200% in one year. The coin is still down 79% from its all-time high of US$144.96 (AU$210.7) on November 21, 2021.
Source: CoinGecko
The price surge is driven by several factors. For instance, Avalanche is seeing interest from institutions like Grayscale, which recently launched an Avalanche trust for its accredited investors. In the gaming world, Konami announced its debut of a non-fungible token (NFT) platform on the Avalanche blockchain.
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However, the biggest reason is probably hype surrounding the blockchain’s first major upgrade —the Avalanche9000 upgrade.
Avalanche’s Biggest Upgrade Since 2020
The Avalanche9000 upgrade is expected to improve scalability and cost efficiency and provide more resources and tools to attract more developers. This is the latest major upgrade since its mainnet debut in September 2020.
As part of this upgrade, the Avalanche Foundation announced a US$40M (AU$58.1M) grant program—Retro9000—to encourage developers to build on the network.
To participate, developers must build in public, share their work with the Avalanche community, test their project, and ship it to be rewarded. Luigi DeMeo, COO at Ava Labs, commented on the matter:
Avalanche9000 is the culmination of years of development work to build a platform that can support fast, scalable and connected L1s. The Retro9000 incentivized testnet program attempts to bootstrap an L1 ecosystem and provide the earliest and most engaging developers incentives to build their product.
Luigi DeMeo, COO at Ava Labs
The rationale here is to accelerate adoption, attract more projects, and increase demand for AVAX. It makes sense, given that the Avalanche ecosystem has remained practically the same regarding total value locked (TVL).
