Our favourite 7 Avalanche projects
You might’ve seen the astronomical rise of Avalanche over the past couple of months. While the blockchain has been live since September 2020, it wasn’t until the summer of 2021 that the market really started paying attention.
With a recent $230 million raise through a private token sale and a staggering $180 million incentive program to attract users and capital, Avalanche starts gearing up for a second rush.
Avalanche’s ecosystem of dapps has already experienced enormous price increases following the rise of AVAX. With the additional hundreds of millions of capital available, this will likely continue. To help you find your way into Avalanche’s rich ecosystem, we’d like to present our favourite 10 projects.
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Avalaunch ($XAVA)
Avalaunch is Avalanche’s first and prime launchpad. Via Avalaunch, new projects can raise capital while investors get to be among the first ones to get their hands on their tokens.
The project focuses on fair token sales. Instead of first-come-first serve or other questionable token sale setups, everyone can get a chance to invest in Avalaunch’s token sales.
In order to participate, you’ll need some XAVA tokens, go through the platform’s KYC process and verify your wallet. The number of tokens you own plus the time these have been staked determine your allocation. There are three rounds of token sales, one for Avalanche validators, one for XAVA stakers and one for the public.
The interface of Avalaunch is super clean and provides a great user experience. The team is a strong proponent of community involvement and transparency, which is great in the oftentimes obscure crypto market.
Thus far, three projects have raised capital through the launchpad with many more down the pipeline.
Trader Joe ($JOE)
Trader Joe is a decentralized exchange and yield farm platform. You can exchange nearly every Avalanche token on the platform and earn juicy yields through Joe’s pools. Additionally, the platform is set to release many more features including a DAO with voting, limit options and derivatives. As a user, you can earn Joe through farming pools or by staking the token for anywhere between 20% and 40% APR without the risk of impermanent loss.
The Joe token has been on an absolute tear the past couple of months, shooting from $0.03 cents all the way to $4.50. JOE is also finding its way unto centralized exchanges, with Gate and FTX leading the way.
The platform is easy to use, has a smooth and stylized interface, unique brand and is blazingly fast. Trader Joe has dramatically outperformed Avalanche’s first DEX, Pangolin in terms of users, volumes and market cap and seems to be delivering new products a lot faster. With the lending feature live, more features coming and a super engaged community, Trader Joe is well on its way to become the de facto DEX of Avalanche.
BenQi ($QI)
BenQi is a lending and borrowing protocol built specifically for Avalanche. Users can earn passive income by depositing their assets in Benqi’s liquidity pool and can borrow from this pool against an interest fee.
The dapp is easy to use and already has over $1 billion in liquidity. This is an important achievement as more liquidity leads to a more stable liquidity market. As liquidity is essential to DeFi and BenQi is the first native liquidity protocol on Avalanche, the project has managed to attract investments from multiple reputable investors such as Ava Labs and Arrington capital. It is also the first Avalanche-native token that was listed on Binance.
While the project has a lot of potential, competition is fierce. Even though BenQi is Avalanche-native, this advantage can only last so long as other, much larger, liquidity protocols such as Aave and Curve have already launched on Avalanche. That being said, BenQi has already attracted an impressive number of users and capital and can be expected to continue growing alongside the Avalanche ecosystem.
Kalao ($KLO)
Kalao is creating an ecosystem that focuses on the combination of NFTs and Virtual Reality. Its flagship product is its NFT marketplace, via which users can exchange Virtual Reality assets. These can come in the form of NFTs, such as digital artworks, virtual representations of luxury goods and media items. The plan is to aggregate most NFTs available on the Avalanche network.
The ambitious project launched via Avalaunch and is aiming to support mobile, laptop and VR devices such as the Oculus. They give users an easy way to create their own virtual galleries where they can show off their NFT collections. The platform’s token, KLO, is employed in a tier-based system where owning more unlocks more perks and will have DAO features such as voting on new features, system upgrades and new services.
The team has big plans with their NFT marketplace live and the launch of their gallery, marketplace and multiplayer features for communicating, exchanges and showing NFTs. While competition is fierce in the NFT space, it is also still very new and underdeveloped. If Kalao manages to create an easy to use and smooth experience, it might take the lead in the NFT sector on Avalanche and be its first VR application.
Penguin Finance ($PEFI)
Penguin Finance is an all-round DeFi dapp. It is one of the oldest projects on Avalanche and offers an impressive line of products, including yield farming, auto-compounding, DeFi games, NFT collectibles and even a launchpad for token sales.
Ultimately, the goal of Penguin Finance is to become a DAO, giving the control over the DeFi hub to the PeFi token owners. This token can also be staked for a solid yearly return and staking is required to participate in the token sales, the first two of which were already successful.
While the team is anonymous, the pace of development and addition of new features to Penguin Finance is one of the most impressive we’ve seen on Avalanche. Competition is fierce in the DeFi space, but given the project’s track record and deep understanding of the gamification of finance, we have high hopes for the Penguins.
Verso ($VSO)
Verso is a dapp that focuses specifically on bridging the traditional world of finance with its decentralized alternative. The problem Verso is trying to solve is enormous and DeFi has the potential to bring significant efficiency improvements to the traditional world of finance in terms of costs, speed, control and privacy.
The goal is to bring the two together on its DeFi marketplace. Verso cleverly combines traditional regulatory requirements with the perks of DeFi. The project is expecting to roll out its first products this quarter, which will likely be a DeFi product and a decentralized micro-insurance product in the first release. To date, the team announced partnerships with Dash, HurricaneSwap and a Singapore-based insurance company.
The project still has a tiny market cap and high ambitions. The team hasn’t launched any products yet, but given its focus on traditional finance, quality and security are prioritized over rushing to market. If the team rolls out its first products this quarter, which also includes an option to directly purchase the VSO token with credit card via the website, big things can happen.
Colony ($CLY)
Colony is about as Avalanche as it gets. The project is an ecosystem accelerator that invests in and supports Avalanche projects. Off-chain, there are already many of these, but Colony is one of the first that is on-chain, community-driven with the ultimate goal of becoming a DAO.
Besides investing in early-stage Avalanche projects, Colony is offering liquidity services to DeFi projects, wants to maintain an index for top Avalanche projects and validate networks. The decision-making processes for these services will gradually be handed over to the community of CLY holders, the project’s native token.
CLY was sold to the public via Avalanche. Besides governance, it also gives access to airdrops from invested projects, buyback mechanisms and staking rewards.
The team is experienced and backed by a host of Avalanche-native parties. Colony looks like a very solid Avalanche ecosystem play and we recommend checking out their dapp, where you can see what the project has in store for its community.
Documentation
Bonus: Hubble
Hubble is the first Avalanche-native derivatives protocol. The project is set to bring decentralized futures to the ecosystem, enabling investors to short assets, take on leverage on other exotic financial instruments.
As collateral for these products, a wide variety of crypto assets such as AVAX, BTC, ETH and USDC can be used. Another cool feature is that derivative positions can be tokenized and hence traded on secondary markets or used on other protocols, something that is uniquely possible in DeFi.
The project is currently on the Fuji testnet with its launch on mainet around the corner. The team has been putting a lot of effort into building a strong community on its Discord and even has its own song and their NFT collection, the SpaceCats.
Once Hubble is live, people can start trading perpetual futures, which is a huge market. Most of the derivatives trading still happens on centralized exchanges like Binance and FTX but with the user base gradually shifting towards decentralized alternatives and Avalanche continuing to gain capital and users,
Documentation (NA)
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Network effects for a fast ecosystem
Avalanche boasts one of the fastest growing ecosystems in the market. There are dozens of Avalanche-native projects, but due to Avalanche’s superior scalability compared to Ethereum, Ethereum-native projects have been migrating to Avalanche.
Together, they are shaping an ecosystem that is rapidly offering all the latest and greatest use cases of blockchain and crypto. Although Avalanche still is up-and-coming, all the building blocks are there to make people stick to the breakthrough protocol. Our favourite projects in this list are such building blocks.
With hundreds of projects on the way and Avalanche’s subnets coming online soon, which enable customized blockchains still connected to Avalanche, we’re still expecting a lot from this ecosystem over the next months and years.
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