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Avalanche Commits $290M in AVAX to Attract Gaming, DeFi and NFT ‘Subnets’
The “Multiverse” incentive fund is meant to create a network of application-specific blockchains.
The Avalanche Foundation announced Tuesday a major push to woo top projects with a cache of 4 million AVAX tokens (worth $290 million at today’s prices).
Specifically, the effort looks to foster smart-contract blockchain Avalanche’s “subnet” functionality, where application-specific blockchains – be they for Web 3 gaming or decentralized finance (DeFi) – can be spun up at scale.
STORY CONTINUES BELOW
Early targets of the so-called “Multiverse” initiative include DeFi Kingdoms, a popular game that ported over to Avalanche in December. The effort will create a new Avalanche-native token, CRYSTAL, meant to complement the game’s existing JEWEL token, according to Tuesday’s press release.
Other members of the project’s first cohort include Aave, Golden Tree Asset Management, Wintermute, Jump Crypto, Valkyrie and Securitize.
The new injection of funding speaks to the continued race among newer base layers competing for the smart-contract mindshare that Ethereum has long commanded.
Identity and compliance measures baked into certain subnets could be a boon for institutional DeFi, Aave founder Stani Kulechov said in a statement.
“This is a significant leap toward a future where the barriers between traditional and decentralized finance cease to exist,” he said.
From a technical perspective, projects utilizing their own “subnet” blockchains will eliminate competition for pooled resources, which has become an issue on Ethereum for events like popular non-fungible token (NFT) drops.
Other blockchains touting similar technologies are Polkadot (with its “parachains”) and Cosmos (with its “zones”).
UPDATE (March 8, 16:22 UTC): Adds Kulechov statement and more information.
Zack Seward
Zack Seward is CoinDesk’s contributing editor-at-large. Up until July 2022, he served as CoinDesk’s deputy editor-in-chief. Prior to joining CoinDesk in November 2018, he was the editor-in-chief of Technical.ly, a news site focused on local tech communities on the U.S. East Coast. Before that, Seward worked as a reporter covering business and technology for a pair of NPR member stations, WHYY in Philadelphia and WXXI in Rochester, New York. Seward originally hails from San Francisco and went to college at the University of Chicago. He worked at the PBS NewsHour in Washington, D.C., before attending Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism.
Eli Tan
Eli was a news reporter for CoinDesk who covered NFTs, gaming and the metaverse. He graduated from St. Olaf College with a degree in English. He holds ETH, SOL, AVAX and a few NFTs above CoinDesk's disclosure threshold of $1000.
