Avalanche, one of the youngest smart contracts-enabled cryptocurrencies, raises $230M in funding led by Polychain, others

Avalanche, a new blockchain tech startup that promises to offer the industry’s fastest smart contracts, has raised $230 million in a token sale to institutional investors led by Polychain and Three Arrows Capital. Avalanche is a smart contract-enabled cryptocurrency that also supports the proof-of-stake blockchain.

Other backers including R/Crypto Fund, Dragonfly, CMS Holdings, Collab+Currency, Lvna Capital, and a group of angel investors, also participated in the funding round.

The foundation behind the Avalanche blockchain said that the funding proceeds from the token sale — which was completed in June — to support and accelerate the rapid growth of decentralized finance or DeFi, enterprise applications, and other use cases on the Avalanche public blockchain.

Founded in 2018, the New York-based Avalanche is an open-source platform for launching highly decentralized applications, new financial primitives, and new interoperable blockchains. Avalanche was launched in September 2020 and the company already has more than 225 projects building on the platform, including DeFi projects like Tether, SushiSwap, Chainlink, Circle, and The Graph.

Since its launch a year ago,  Avalanche’s native token, AVAX, has outperformed all other top 20 cryptocurrencies in the past week with a 65% gain, and is currently the 14th-biggest with a market value of about $13.3 billion, according to CoinGecko.com pricing.

With millions of dollars war chest, Avalanche has already rolled out a $180 million liquidity mining incentive scheme in an effort to lure DeFi developers in August — a move that is similar to other rival blockchains.

“We have been relying on the technology having great organic growth, and now it’s time to supercharge that growth,” said John Wu. “All the pieces are there.”

About the interest of these venture capital companies, Emin Gun Sirer, director of the Avalanche Foundation, said:

“Avalanche has quickly turned promise and potential into real-world impact and value creation for DeFi users and developers. The community of builders rallying around the network is a testament to its competitive edge, and there is still so much potential yet to be tapped at the intersection of institutional and decentralized finance on Avalanche.”

“Despite being years younger than its peers, Avalanche has quickly turned promise and potential into real-world impact and value creation for DeFi users and developers,” Gün Sirer added.