The Defiant

Avalanche Joins Layer 1 Funding Boom with $200M War Chest for Devs

Avalanche rises $200M developer fund in Layer 1 buildout boom.

By: Brady Dale Loading...

Avalanche Joins Layer 1 Funding Boom with $200M War Chest for Devs

Lots of Layer-1 blockchains have announced large developer funds to encourage more applications in their ecosystems. Avalanche is the latest.

Today, probabilistic consensus blockchain Avalanche announced over $200M in available funding for entrepreneurs, with backing from Polychain Capital, Three Arrows Capital and, of course, Avalanche Foundation and Ava Labs.

The new fund is called Blizzard, continuing with Avalanche’s snow and winter theme. Avalanche was founded by Cornell University professor Emin Gün Sirer. This deal follows a $230M investment made by Polychain and Three Arrows in Avalanche in September.

Giant War Chests

Blizzard is looking for projects in decentralized finance, NFTs, enterprise, and culture.

Avalanche follows several other base layer blockchains that have announced giant war chests to encourage the development of new products for their technology, including Harmony ($300M), Algorand ($300M) and Near ($800M).

Avalanche currently has $8.5B in total value locked (TVL), according to DeFiLlama. Harmony has $309M, Algorand has $77M and Near has $140M.

All of these projects offer faster transactions and finality, and they are further along on new technologies that won’t be seen at all on Ethereum, the market leader, until at least Ethereum 2.0 goes live. And yet they each have far fewer assets committed to them than the original smart contract blockchain, which recently broke $100B in TVL, still holding the plurality of resources in DeFi.

Blizzard was first announced on Forbes, and the AVAX token quickly climbed $3, from $63.50 before the announcement to just under $66 as of noon in New York City.

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