Avalanche Closes $250M Private Token Sale Ahead Of Upgrade

Avalanche, a blockchain deployment platform and Layer 1 network, raised $250 million ahead of its highly-anticipated Avalanche9000 upgrade.

On Dec. 12, Avalanche announced the closure of a $250 million private token sale distributing locked AVAX to investors. The round was led by Galaxy Digital, Dragonfly, and ParaFi Capital, with more than 40 investment firms participating in total.

The news comes as Avalanche is gearing up for the initial mainnet launch of its Avalanche9000 upgrade on Dec. 16, with full deployment planned for early 2025.

The project expects Avalache9000 will reduce the expenses associated with deploying Layer 1 networks leveraging Avalanche’s tech by 99.9%. The upgrade is also estimated to reduce transaction fees for users of Avalanche C-Chain, Avalanche’s flagship Layer 1 network, by 25 times.

A testnet for Avalanche9000 went live on Nov. 25. Avalanche is offering $40 million in retroactive grants for developers who launch Layer 1 networks or technical tooling on the testnet.

“Avalanche's upcoming Avalanche9000 upgrade represents a pivotal step toward advancing the decentralized finance ecosystem,” said Haseeb Qureshi, the managing partner at Dragonfly.

“The upcoming Avalanche9000 upgrade marks a leap forward in scalability and innovation, positioning Avalanche as a leading ecosystem for asset tokenization,” added Ben Forman, the founder of ParaFi Capital.

The price of AVAX is up 11.4% over the past 24 hours and 53.6% in 30 days, according to The Defiant’s crypto price feeds.

The total value locked on the Avalanche C-Chain is up 66% since the start of November at $2.18 billion, according to DeFi Llama. Despite the recent growth, the network remains down by 81% since tagging an all-time high of $11.5 billion in December 2021.