AVAX Price Rides Wave as Avalanche Developer Reportedly Seeks USD 350M in Funding

cryptonews.com:

With Ava Labs, the lead developer of the Avalanche blockchain, said to pursue new funding round, possibly becoming one of the most highly valued crypto-focused startups, the price of its native coin AVAX is accelerating upwards.

With the aim to support its further expansion, the company is seeking some USD 350m in funding at a valuation of about USD 5.25bn, a person close to the effort told Bloomberg.

At 8:34 UTC, AVAX’s price was up 4.8% over a 24-hour period. Over the past 30 days, the altcoin’s price has increased by 18%, per Coingecko.com data. This provides AVAX with a current market capitalization of USD 21.74bn.

Avalanche has been making efforts to compete against more prominent blockchains by offering its users relatively high speeds and low transaction fees for various applications, including trading, lending, and gaming.

Ava Labs claims that "Avalanche is the fastest smart contracts platform in the blockchain industry, as measured by time-to-finality" and that it has "the most validators securing its activity of any proof-of-stake protocol." The blockchain's founders stated that it offers a transactional finality of fewer than two seconds.

It also claims that deploying “smart contracts on Avalanche cost just a tenth of what they cost on Ethereum.”

Last September, a USD 230m investment in the blockchain was led by Polychain and Three Arrows Capital, joined by R/Crypto Fund, Dragonfly, CMS Holdings, Collab+Currency, Lvna Capital, as well as a group of angel investors and family offices, the Avalanche Foundation said in a statement.

The foundation said it aimed to use the acquired funds to support and accelerate the growth of decentralized finance (DeFi), enterprise applications, and other use cases on the Avalanche