Avalanche Rush to start ‘next week’

The long-awaited launch of Avalanche Rush incentives is due to start next week, according to a cryptic Twitter post from Avalanche.

The message unveiled the proposed launch date in video form, revealing the $700m incentives program led by DeFi platforms Aave and Curve will begin ‘next week’.

It’s anticipated that Avalanche Rush incentives will bring greater growth to the TVL and yields available to DeFi users. A number of leading DeFi platforms have also been allocated incentives alongside Aave and Curve, including SushiSwap, BENQI, YieldYak and Pangolin.

The initial announcement has since led to incredible growth in the Avalanche ecosystem – including a $230m private token sale to institutions such as Three Arrows Capital looking to stake a claim.

Its native token – AVAX – has seen a price increase of 147.64% since the August 18 announcement and the Total Value Locked (TVL) across the burgeoning Avalanche DeFi ecosystem has grown from $320m to a high of $3.2b in the same period.

The price of AVAX also reached an all-time high of $79.52 on September 23.

DeFi the major catalyst

DeFi has been the leading contributor to the exponential growth of Avalanche, with platforms such as Trader Joe attracting a new wave of DeFi users to the blockchain through high-yields, low transaction fees and sub-second transactions.

Avalanche CEO Emin Gün Sirer said recently that it has the lowest transaction fees in the Layer-1 space and sub-second ‘time-to-finality’ on transactions, which measures the amount of time a user waits to receive confirmation that a transaction cannot be changed or cancelled.

Additionally, Avalanche has greatly improved its network capabilities through the launch of Snowman++ – an upgrade that has since reduced transaction fees even further.

Aave CEO Stani Kulechov also teased the use of AVAX as collateral on market-leading DeFi protocol Aave, saying that it’s “up to the community vote”. The Aave community recently voted a resounding 99.7% yes to a YES/NO proposal on whether Aave should deploy on Avalanche.