Topline
Avalanche cryptocurrency AVAX is now one of the ten largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, overtaking popular meme tokens dogecoin and Shiba Inu in defiance of a market-wide crash that wiped hundreds of billions in value and saw prices of major cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ether plummet from near-record highs.
AVAX was one of just two top 20 cryptocurrencies to grow over the last week
Key Facts
AVAX was trading at around $134 on Monday morning, a jump of around 40% over the past week, according to CoinGecko.
The rally took AVAX’s market cap to just under $30 billion, marginally overtaking dogecoin as the tenth most valuable cryptocurrency.Â
AVAX’s soaring value comes amid a market-wide crash that has seen most major tokens—including all top-ten cryptocurrencies not pegged to other assets: bitcoin, ether, Binance coin, solana, cardano, XRP and polkadot—drop by double-digit percentages over the past seven days.
The token’s price surged after professional services firm Deloitte announced plans last week to use Avalanche’s technology to build better U.S. disaster relief platforms. Â
The price of AVAX has more than doubled in the past 30 days and grown more than 3,000% over the year.Â
What To Watch For
Dogecoin v AVAX. Cryptocurrencies are a notoriously volatile asset class and even assets at the very top of the market are not immune to wild and rapid fluctuations. Both AVAX and dogecoin have market capitalizations of around $30 billion—with around $200 million separating the two at the time of writing—and are jostling for the number 10 cryptocurrency slot. AVAX already (briefly) overtook dogecoin once before on Sunday when it reached a record high of $144.96, before falling back to number 11. Dogecoin, along with a parody Shiba Inu (sitting at number 12), are perhaps more volatile than most assets, having started off as jokes and taken on new lives as popular memes. Â
Key Background
AVAX’s gains defy a market-wide crash that has seen hundreds of billions in value wiped from the crypto market. It erased some of the gains made throughout the pandemic—though the market is still substantially larger than before the pandemic—when the sector thrived with an influx of retail investors, a wider array of options to trade digital currencies, growing public and institutional interest in cryptocurrency and the soaring popularity of meme stocks and tokens.Â
TangentÂ
At its current value, AVAX is valued more than social media company Pinterest, bank Société Générale and Southwest Airlines.  Â
Further Reading
Avalanche Launches $220 Million Crypto Growth Fund Targeting DeFi And NFTs (Forbes)
