Avalanche creates $200 million fund to lure top crypto devs

The Avalanche Foundation has unveiled “Blizzard” — a fund offering more than $200 million in incentives to developers who build on the Avalanche (AVAX) network.

The fund will provide liquidity to those early-stage projects that innovate decentralized finance (DeFi) applications, nonfungible tokens (NFTs), and other products on Avalanche.

Avalanche is a Proof-of-Stake network that launched in September 2020. The network boasts Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatibility, allowing developers to port decentralized applications over from Ethereum. The network now boasts more than 320 projects that are currently building on it, including top stablecoin issuer Tether, popular DEX SushiSwap, and oracle providers Chainlink and The Graph.

Per a Nov. 1 announcement, Blizzard’s contributors include the Avalanche Foundation, Ava Labs, Polychain Capital, Three Arrows Capital, Dragonfly Capital, and CMS Holdings.

Blizzard will prioritize four key areas of growth across the Avalanche ecosystem — DeFi, enterprise applications, NFTs, and culture applications. The funds will be used for equity investments, token purchases, partnership efforts, technology, and business development.

Builders within the ecosystem will also be offered ongoing support, with Ava Labs president John Wu stating:

“Blizzard is entering the Avalanche community at a pivotal moment, where this influx of users and activity demands constant innovation in new applications and use cases on the platform.”

Avalanche is the sixth largest proof-of-stake network with a $14 billion staked capitalization and t 56% of it’s supply  currently staked.

Per DefiLlama, Avalanche is the 5th-largest network with a total value locked of $8.5 billion, with its TVL having surged by 2,624% from just $312 million in August.

Related: Cointelegraph Consulting: How Avalanche is reimagining DeFi

According to CoinGecko, AVAX is down roughly 18% from it’s Sep. 23 all-time high of $79.31, last trading hands for $64.80 at the time of writing.