Avalanche’s summit event in Barcelona, which drew around 3,500 participants, was the proof of stake blockchain’s biggest highlight in March.
The in-person event that ran between March 22 and 27 was one of the many blockchain conferences last month. More events are expected in April as the crypto conference season continues. Notably, the number of attendees of the Barcelona event was higher than those that attended Solana’s three-day event last November in Lisbon.
This week’s other talking point has been the price action of Avalanche’s native token, AVAX, which raced to a 12-week high of $101.69 yesterday. Though it has since slid almost 6% to $94.46, it is still trading 9.97% up in the last 7-days. Here’s how the token and its ecosystem performed in March:
Market Metrics
Market capital
Avalanche’s (AVAX) circulating market cap has seen two performance phases in either half of March. In the first half of the month, the market capital largely dwelt below $21 billion, and in the second, the figure largely floated above this mark.
Start of the month, Avalanche had a market capitalization of $20.82 billion, which fell to a monthly low of $18.10 billion on March 14 as the general market receded. The figure peaked at $27.10 billion on the last day of the month as the token surged to a multi-week high.
Blockchain and Network Metrics
Avalanche C-chain transactions
Avalanche’s default smart contract blockchain defied the consistent growth in the total number of transactions that it had previously mounted from as far back as August 2021. The transaction count in consecutive months had been seeing new milestones relative to the previous months. However, compared to February, the number of transactions slightly dropped off in March.
Avalanche daily transactions chart over the last two months
The total transactions count sustained a rise for the first few days of the month, peaking on March 3 – at 1,076,987, up from the 1,031,112 transactions recorded on the 1st. A slump over the next few days saw the figure drop to 727,287 on March 8 before recovering. Throughout the month, the total number of transactions on the Avalanche c-chain remained below 1 million.
Avalanche C-chain unique addresses
The total unique addresses on Avalanche’s smart contract platform continued with the upward trend it has historically defined, with each day across the month seeing a minimum of 7,000 additional addresses. The instance with the single highest daily increase (24,374 additional addresses) was March 15, when the native token hit the monthly lowest price figure.
Avalanche unique addresses YTD chart
By March 30, the total count of addresses had burgeoned to 2,388,716, up from 2,113,762 on March 1. Worth noting, the hike throughout March was bigger than February by around 10,000 addresses. January’s difference of 366,934 addresses is still the highest logged this year.
Average gas price (AVAX)
The average gas price on the blockchain in March remained at par with January and February.
Avalanche gas price chart across February and March
One notable highlight was that for the first time this year, the gas price settled below 40 nAVAX on March 10, reaching 39.21 nAVAX. The minimum gas price, which had stayed at $25 nAVAX on virtually all days since the turn of the year, spiked above that line between March 21 and 25, after which it reset back to 25 nAVAX. The highest average gas fee seen in March was 89.76 nAVAX, clocked on March 16.
The gas prices in the first three months continued a pattern of dominantly par-100 nAVAX that was established in late September. Evidently, March led the Avalanche network towards setting an even lower ceiling – there were no gas fees above 90 nAVAX for the entirety of March.
Avalanche C-chain network utilization
The network utilization on Avalanche’s contract chain continued with a steady rise towards the 50% mark. Since January, this consistent increase has been characteristic of the c-chain’s utilization. The network utilization saw a marginal change of 0.6% to reach 44.54% on March 30, compared to a +17.06% change in January and +8.11% across February. This figure was least (41.38%) on March 9 and highest (47.27%) on March 17 – the closest it has ever come to the 50% mark.
DeFi performance
DeFi market share
Avalanche had a market share of 5.36% at the start of the month, ranking it fifth among DeFi ecosystems, behind Ethereum, Terra, BSC, and Fantom. Notably, Avalanche had been ranked fourth for most of February and only lost the spot to Fantom in the latter days of the month (February 27).
The latter, however, didn’t hold onto that spot, handing it back on March 4. Avalanche, which had a market share of 5.32% at the time, retained the fourth-place ranking over the remaining days of the month despite its market share decreasing.
Total Value Locked
The total value locked (TVL) on the Avalanche ecosystem stayed above $10 billion for most of March, only falling below this point on March 26 and 27 – $9.85 billion and $9.93 billion, respectively.
Avalanche TVL across March
The monthly low on March 26 came at the back of a lengthy descent, which extended for a week from the peak recorded on March 19 – $11.35 billion. The TVL figure on March 31 was $10.44 billion- 5.60% lower than the figure at the start of the month. Relative to January 1, the TVL at the end of March had shrunk by around 11%.
Avalanche is one of the only two chains among the top ten DeFi ecosystems that saw negative month-over-month change by the end of March. The other is Fantom, which lost almost half its TVL during the month.
Out of the more than 180 protocols on Avalanche, open-source liquidity market protocol AAVE was the most dominant – 29.19%, despite its TVL paring down by 6% month over month. AAVE had a TVL of $3 billion on March 31 – almost twice the second largest protocol on the chain.
To learn more about Avalanche, visit our Investing in Avalanche guide.
The post Avalanche Monthly Analysis – March 2022 appeared first on Securities.io.
