The Avalanche Snow Report: July 2023

Welcome to The Avalanche Snow Report! This monthly newsletter brings you highlights from across the Avalanche ecosystem, including DeFi, Enterprise & Institutional, NFTs & Culture, Gaming, and Infrastructure & Enablement.

Have feedback or want to learn more? Please contact luke.chmiel@avalabs.org.

Network Highlights

Taking Stock After a Historic Start to 2023 for the Avalanche Network

With the first half of the year in the books, we saw a number of quarterly reports and general reflections unpacking the first half of the year on Avalanche. Messari highlights the growth in daily active addresses and transactions on the C-Chain in their State of Avalanche Q2 2023 report. Reflexivity Research dove into the latest from Ava Labs in their Quarterly Report, which highlighted the growth of subnets and the rollout of AvaCloud. Looking ahead, Morgan Krupetsky and Luigi D’Onorio Demeo joined The Tie’s Avalanche Q3 2023 State of the Ecosystem webinar to share their reflections on recent developments and the path forward for Avalanche. Last but not least, Ava Labs’ VP of Engineer Patrick O’Grady shared the most impactful Avalanche releases of the year, including Avalanche Warp Messaging (AWM), HyperSDK, and Cortina.

Avalanche Exceeds 1M MAU’s for Third Straight Month, Hits 20M Active Addresses

After June marked the Avalanche network’s third consecutive month with a new all-time-high for monthly active users, July saw another strong month of user activity, with Avalanche notching three consecutive months with more than 1,000,000 monthly active users for the first time in the network’s history. In addition, July marked a historic moment in the network’s history as Avalanche officially surpassed 20M active addresses, setting a new all-time high. Follow the latest network metrics here.

DeFi

Uniswap, the Largest DEX by Volume, is Officially Live on Avalanche

Following the successful passing of Uniswap’s governance proposal for the deployment of Uni V3 on Avalanche, DeFi’s leading DEX officially arrived on C-Chain this month with all the benefits of V3’s concentrated liquidity. Uniswap's remarkable track record speaks for itself, facilitating over $1.5 trillion in lifetime transaction volume. The deployment enables tens of thousands of users from other ecosystems that utilize Uniswap to experience Avalanche’s fast time-to-finality and low transaction fees.

Struct Finance Brings Structured Products to Avalanche With BTC.b Yields

Struct Finance is the latest DeFi platform specializing in interest rate products. It plans to segment yield-bearing assets into various tranches, each associated with different risk profiles.

Struct Finance is enhancing its offerings by building on top of existing DeFi applications like GMX.io. It holds the distinction of being the first to offer a combination of fixed-income and variable-yield tranches on Avalanche. Recently, Struct Finance has extended to include Bitcoin (BTC.b). Since launching last month, Struct has been one of the fastest growing DeFi protocol on Avalanche, with TVL now sitting at $1.25M.

EUROC Propels Avalanche To Be a Leader in On-Chain FX

The use of EUROC on Avalanche has been setting record volumes, outperforming even Ethereum. This can be attributed to Avalanche's advantageous qualities, such as scalability, performance, user-friendly UI, and efficient fiat on-ramps, custody, and identity solutions. 

The stablecoin EUROC is widely employed across these platforms, used as collateral in DeltaPrimeDefi, and contributes to liquidity pools like Trader Joe's USDC-EUROC pool, and facilitates FX trading on platforms like Cables Finance, Dexalot, and Glacier Fi. Moreover, Mt Perlin provides seamless on and off-ramp solutions for EUROC.

Enterprise & Institutions

Avalanche Vista Program Provides a Boost for Tokenization on Avalanche

Amidst the recent rise of interest in tokenization, the Avalanche Foundation announced the launch of Avalanche Vista, a $50M investment program that will consider purchasing tokenized assets across the liquidity spectrum, including equity, credit, real estate, commodities, as well as those that are blockchain-native.

The initiative aims to support protocols on Avalanche that have a clear value proposition, a comprehensive go-to-market strategy, and a thoughtful view on product-market fit, as we believe these qualities will distinguish the winners of this multi-trillion-dollar opportunity set.

The Vista program reflects the Avalanche Foundation’s commitment to driving forward a new financial system — one that’s more accessible, efficient, and cost-effective — that is turbocharged by Avalanche’s revolutionary technology. You can read the official Avalanche blog post on Vista here.

Introducing the Tokenization 101 Blog Series

This month also saw the debut of Tokenization 101, a new blog series tackling the various use cases, new technological innovations, and all the complexities of tokenization. You can check out the first blog post, “What is Asset Tokenization: Why & Why Now?” here.

Securitize Launches New Tokenized Security in Europe on Avalanche

Securitize, a blockchain firm specializing in the tokenization of real-world assets, has started issuing tokenized securities in Europe that represent equity in the Spanish real estate investment trust Mancipi Partners. The shares will be tokenized on the Avalanche blockchain, in a testing environment to start, and secondary trading is set to begin in September. Learn more here.

Gaming

Raini Studios’ The Lords of Light is listed on the Epic Games Store

The fun loving and memeable trading card game, The Lords of Light, by Raini Studios launched on the Epic Games Store on July 23rd. The listing aims to increase distribution and onboard more gamers into the Rainiverse. The Lords of Light will be deploying their digital trading cards on Merit Circle’s Beam Subnet.

Solert Games Launches Dedicated Subnet

Solert Games launched a new Avalanche subnet, with the goal of creating a gaming sandbox for gamers and game developers. The Subnet will debut with the release of Solert's medieval-themed mobile game, Legends at War. It will be powered by its gas token, $LAW, and will provide developers with a suite of tools to create immersive gaming experiences. The Solert Subnet aims to integrate Web2 social aspects with Web3 decentralization and digital ownership.

NFTs & Culture

Avalanche Park Introduces the Summer Creative Hang

Avalanche Park recently announced the Summer Creative Hang, a series of local meetups funded by Ava Labs. Users from the Avalanche NFT ecosystem are invited to apply for a chance at hosting an event in their town. The activities will be open to all locals and ticketing will be handled by the Moongate platform. Learn more and apply.

HUG Invites Avaissance Artists to Platform

HUG, an exclusive social network for artists and collectors, is partnering with the Avalanche Foundation to help uplift the first cohort of creators in the Artists in Residence program. Boasting 2,000+ artists and an audience of 2 million, the platform will feature Avaissance artists through a unique community and verified AIR artist badge. Additionally, HUG will co-host two weeks of the Avalanche Digital Art Challenge. Read more about the initiatives.

Infrastructure & Enablement

Core ‘Stake’ Empowers Anyone to Stake AVAX in Seconds

Core users can now easily stake and delegate AVAX to the Avalanche network, aided by a step-by-step walkthrough, custom settings, and nuanced performance tracking. Avalanche validators can seamlessly customize their staking via Core’s web portfolio, and delegators have a more accessible and affordable way to participate in receiving staking rewards. Core web also now supports all three Avalanche chains, allowing assets to move easily between X/P/C chains. Learn more about Core Stake here.

Avalanche HyperSDK Improved to Use Millisecond-Denominated Block Times

Ava Labs VP on Engineering Patrick O’Grady announced that he successfully migrated the Avalanche HyperSDK to use millisecond-denominated block times instead of second-denominated (like all other Avalanche VMs) in order to "block cost" and "surplus fee". For additional context on the upgrade to HyperSDK, read this thread.

ICYMI: Avalanche Sessions