With a stash of 4 million AVAX tokens (worth $290 million at today’s rates), the Avalanche Foundation unveiled a huge drive to woo top projects on Tuesday.
The endeavour aims to promote Avalanche’s “subnet” capability, which allows application-specific blockchains – such as those for Web 3 gaming or decentralised finance (DeFi) – to be put up at scale.
DeFi Kingdoms, a popular game that moved to Avalanche in December, is one of the first targets of the so-called “Multiverse” programme. According to a news statement issued Tuesday, the initiative will result in the creation of CRYSTAL, a new Avalanche-native currency that will complement the game’s existing JEWEL token.
Aave, Golden Tree Asset Management, Wintermute, Jump Crypto, Valkyrie, and Securitize are among the project’s first cohort participants.
The latest round of funding reflects the ongoing competition among newer foundation layers for the smart-contract mindshare that Ethereum has long held.
Aave creator Stani Kulechov stated in a statement that identity and compliance checks integrated into particular subnets might be a benefit for institutional DeFi.
“This is a huge step toward a future where traditional and decentralised finance are no longer separated,” he said.
Technically, projects that use their own “subnet” blockchains will minimise rivalry for pooled resources, which has proven a problem on Ethereum for events like popular non-fungible token (NFT) drops.
Polkadot (with its “parachains”) and Cosmos (with its “zones”) are two more blockchains that advertise comparable capabilities.