[Recap] Quarterly State of Avalanche Recap: Q1 2025

The Quarterly State of Avalanche Recap on January 28, 2025, was hosted by Heidi Pickett from The Tie, featuring guests John Nahas, Chief Business Officer at Ava Labs, and Morgan Krupetsky, Senior Director of Business Development for Institutions & Capital Markets at Ava Labs. The discussion covered significant updates, including Avalanche 9000, institutional and capital markets developments, gaming, ticketing, decentralized physical infrastructure (DePin), the Avalanche Card, and future goals leading into 2025.

John Nahas introduced Avalanche 9000 as the most significant upgrade in Avalanche’s history, fundamentally changing how Layer 1 (L1) blockchains are launched. This upgrade enhances scalability, reduces costs, and improves interoperability between private and public blockchains. Currently, there are approximately 60 live L1 blockchains on Avalanche, 37 launched projects, and over 100 more in development on Testnet. Morgan highlighted that Avalanche 9000 enables permissionless L1s, meaning any project that launches its own token can have users stake it and secure the L1 network. Key impacts of the upgrade include allowing institutions to validate blockchains, reducing validation costs from 2000 AVAX to 1.33 AVAX per validator per month, and lowering C-Chain transaction fees by 25x. This development enables anyone with an idea to launch their own blockchain, making blockchain deployment as accessible as website creation with WordPress. Additionally, Retro9000, a $40 million retroactive funding program by the Avalanche Foundation, was announced. This initiative will reward innovative projects, with funding allocations determined through community voting.

Morgan detailed upgrades to AvaCloud, an infrastructure offering that provides blockchain as a managed service. With AvaCloud, companies, governments, and game developers don’t need deep blockchain expertise to launch and maintain their networks. Recently, AvaCloud acquired Etrepay, enhancing its privacy solutions. These privacy measures, which mirror traditional finance (TradFi), allow two transacting parties to restrict trade details to only those who need access. AvaCloud’s privacy solutions also played a role in Kinexsys by JP Morgan (formerly Onyx Digital Assets), which demonstrated three use cases involving investor onboarding, capital deployment into funds, and secondary market trading, utilizing Zero-Knowledge (ZK), Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), and Distributed Homomorphic Encryption (DHE).

A major milestone in real-world asset (RWA) tokenization is Securitize securing investment from BlackRock to tokenize the BUIDL money market fund. Originally launched on Ethereum, BUIDL has since expanded to Avalanche and other blockchains. Ava Labs approaches RWAs through two key strategies: integrating tokenized assets into DeFi—where holders can use BUIDL as collateral, borrow against it, and leverage these assets in public, permissionless DeFi—and partnering with fintechs, neobanks, and embedded finance providers to bring tokenized assets to users seamlessly. Notable partnerships include StraitsX and Alipay Plus, enhancing cross-border payments in Southeast Asia, and Liddio, a Colombian neobank, offering yield-bearing savings accounts to Colombian users.

Avalanche continues to establish itself as a leading blockchain for gaming projects. Gunzilla Games’ Off the Grid became the first crypto-enabled game on consoles, launching on October 8th and quickly becoming the most popular free-to-play PC game on the Epic Game Store. Gunzilla’s testnet processes 2.5 million transactions daily. Additionally, MapleStory Universe is building its own Layer 1 blockchain, and Beam, an Avalanche L1 dedicated to gaming, has partnered with over 60 games. Beam recently had a successful node sale and will soon transition into a public, permissionless blockchain.

John Nahas shared Avalanche’s growing presence in the ticketing industry. TixBase, a Turkish ticketing leader, manages over 25 million tickets annually on its Avalanche-based platform. Additionally, Sports Illustrated secured a 13-year deal to rename the New York Red Bull Stadium to SI Stadium, where Avalanche will power all ticketing functions, enhancing fan engagement, digital payments, and ticket partnerships. In another major sports collaboration, the Cleveland Cavaliers launched Cavs Rewards, a loyalty program on Avalanche powered by Uptop, allowing fans to earn on-chain achievement badges, quests, VIP experiences, and Cavs points.

Avalanche is expanding into Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePin) with Uplink, which is set to launch the first Avalanche L1 DePin blockchain. Uplink is building a decentralized internet connectivity system that leverages emerging internet infrastructure to enhance decentralized internet solutions.

The Avalanche Card, available in certain jurisdictions, enables users to spend directly from their on-chain holdings without needing to transfer funds to a centralized exchange. Users can earn yield through the app, increasing the card’s utility. The Avalanche Card is expected to be especially valuable in Latin America (LATAM), where demand for the U.S. dollar remains high.

Ava Labs emphasized its commitment to long-term partnerships and mass adoption of Web3 technologies. With ongoing projects and continuous innovation, the firm remains focused on expanding its ecosystem. A major upcoming event is the Avalanche Summit in London from May 20th to 22nd, where the community is invited to participate. Early bird tickets are currently available at AvalancheSummitLondon.com.