Avalanche Watch: December Edition

What’s New on Avalanche

5-Month High in Ecosystem Active Addresses  - Active addresses across all Avalanche subnets have been climbing and are at a five-month high. The Beam subnet has been a major driver of the recent surge in activity. Beam is an open source gaming blockchain governed by Merit Circle DAO with project deployments on Avalanche, Polygon, and ImmutableX. 

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Inscriptions Dominate Transaction Share in December - A flood of inscriptions hit the Avalanche C-Chain in December, accounting for over 95m transactions. Inscriptions are transactions that include calldata and don’t change the blockchain state. Centralized third-party solutions use this calldata off-chain to emulate the smart contract-based experience. Inscriptions are significantly cheaper than standard smart contract-based transactions because they don't change the state of the blockchain. The influx of cheap transactions led to a significant rise in gas fees for other users of the blockchain as the queue of transactions grew. As a result, the C-Chain burned ~3171 AVAX over the course of December. The inscription marketplace reached tens of millions of dollars, and can be explored here.

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The C-Chain scaled to meet the increased transaction demand, reaching a peak daily average of 72.59 transactions per second (TPS) on December 19th. 

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Non-accredited Investors Gain Access to Private Equity - Republic is a financial technology company that has deployed over $2.6 billion in investments. Republic issues the Republic Note, a tokenized fund of over 600 private equity companies including Carta and SpaceX, to non-accredited, KYC’ed investors. Through the Republic Note, everyday people can get exposure to private equity that they wouldn’t otherwise have access to. Read more here. 

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Avalanche Foundation’s Culture Catalyst Fund May Invest in Memecoins - The Avalanche Foundation's Culture Catalyst program, launched last year, is an initiative designed to empower creators and promote blockchain adoption by fostering new forms of creativity and culture. Read the announcement here. 

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Core goes Seedless - Core has implemented a seedless design (meaning you can integrate with existing accounts like Google) to securely manage private keys and offer secure social logins for authentication. This system ensures key safety in secure hardware, prevents loss across devices with robust recovery options, and protects users from phishing and scams through strong multi-factor authentication. Read more here. 

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The Past Month in Decentralized Finance (DeFi)

DEX Volumes Remain Steady - After a strong November, trading volumes remain fairly steady, as do the relative rankings of volume among the largest DEXs on Avalanche. Trader Joe continues to lead the pack.

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BenQi Emerges as Biggest Winner in TVL Growth - BenQi’s three-function platform (borrow and lend, liquid staking, and Ignite) continues to grow in terms of total value locked (+73.5% in December), led by liquid staking. At the end of December BenQi’s liquid staking token, sAVAX, comprised over 95% of the liquid staking market on Avalanche. Ignite, BenQi’s latest platform offering, creates a path for relatively low-cost validators (compared to native validator staking). Ignite introduces a pay-as-you-go model for validators with a minimum fee of 4 avax per week. Alternatively, Ignite validator operators can lower the minimum cost to run a validator from 2000 AVAX through native staking to 500 AVAX + 150 AVAX worth of QI through Ignite. 

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The Past Month in Gaming (GameFi) 

Top Games by User Activity: similar to previous months, DeFi Kingdoms and Chikn remain the Avalanche games with the most active users 

The Past Month in Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs)

On the back of November’s all time high in monthly NFT trading volume, Avalanche had another strong month in December. The top 10 collections combined accounted for a total of nearly 360,000 AVAX of NFT sales. 

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1. Dokyo (241,370 AVAX) - In November, Dokyo became the highest traded NFT collection across all blockchains. Dokyo is a pfp collection of 5,555 NFTs that has led on trading volume since its October release.

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2. Mambonauts (35,743 AVAX) - Mambonauts are the space-bound entry to the MamboMakers ecosystem. Holding one will give you access to whitelists and free mints (both from the MamboMakers team as well as collaborations) and giveaways. 

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3. BloodLoop (20,229 AVAX) - Bloodloop is a hero shooter and massively multiplayer online game. Envisioned as a bridge between web2 and web3, BloodLoop utilizes the potential of the blockchain without making it an obstacle for non-crypto-native users. 

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4. Woofy (17,027 AVAX) - From Cozylabsxyz, Woofys are the pioneers of web3 gaming and the digital identity of the Cozyverse. Explore, build and play as your woofy. Are you ready to join the adventure?

5. ferdy fish (6,264 AVAX) - A collection of 300 NFTs, Ferdy Fish is a PFP project with a strong community and connection to ferdyflip.xyz, a collection of casino games that use Chainlink’s verifiable randomness functions.

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Find more NFT insights here.

Project Spotlight

Hubble Exchange Launches on Mainnet - Hubble Exchange, a new decentralized exchange on an Avalanche Subnet, launched on December 15th. Hubble offers a fully decentralized matching and liquidation engine that pairs with a user experience similar to centralized exchanges. The platform, which uses USDC as a gas token, is part of Hubblenet and supports trading in AVAX, ETH, and SOL initially, with more pairs to be added. Hubble's design emphasizes a seamless user experience with an embedded browser wallet and a robust bridging system using LayerZero, and it introduces a Decentralized Limit Order Book (DLOB) for on-chain transparency and efficiency. Read more here. 

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Avalanche Watch is a data-driven monthly report covering major news and trends in the Avalanche ecosystem, powered by data and analytics from The Tie.

Avalanche is an open, programmable smart contracts platform for decentralized applications. Avalanche has one of the fastest time-to-finality of any blockchain platform and is decentralized, interoperable between other app-chains within the Avalanche ecosystem, customizable, and inexpensive to use.