The Avalanche Foundation launched “Blizzard”, a fund offering more than $200 million to developers as an incentive to build on the Avalanche network.
According to the announcement, the fund will provide liquidity to those early-stage projects that innovate decentralized finance (DeFi) applications, nonfungible tokens (NFTs), and other products on Avalanche.
The announcement stated, “The Avalanche Foundation has launched Blizzard, an over $200M fund dedicated to accelerating development, growth, and innovation across the ecosystem of builders and users of the Avalanche public blockchain and beyond.”
What you should know
Avalanche is a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) network that launched in September 2020. The network features an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatibility, allowing developers to port decentralized applications over from Ethereum.
The network touts of more than 320 projects that are currently building on it, including top stablecoin issuer Tether, popular DEX SushiSwap, and oracle providers Chainlink and The Graph.
The announcement explained that the Blizzard fund is composed of contributions from the Avalanche Foundation, Ava Labs, Polychain Capital, Three Arrows Capital, Dragonfly Capital, CMS Holdings, Republic Capital, R/Crypto Fund, Collab+Currency, Lvna Capital, and Finality Capital Partners amongst others.
It stated that the fund will focus on four key areas. It stated, “The fund is focused on four key areas of growth across the Avalanche ecosystem: DeFi, enterprise applications, NFTs and culture applications, and will also look for opportunities to support other emerging use cases such as security token issuances, liquidity providers and self-sovereign identity. Support for projects from Blizzard will include equity investments, token purchases, and various forms of technology, business development and ecosystem integration support.”
Applications on Avalanche now accounts for over $8.1 billion in total value locked according to DeFi Llama, a measure of the total amount of assets locked in the various DeFi applications smart contract platforms.
The announcement also stated that a dedicated team of fund managers composed of experts in blockchain and decentralized finance research and development, capital markets and finance, business development and operations, marketing and community development will oversee the deployment of capital and provide post-investment portfolio support.
Avalanche’s native token, AVAX, currently trades $65.65, down 0.35% for the day as of the time of writing this report. The network currently has its market capitalization at $14.5 billion, currently ranked #16, according to Coinmarketcap.
