Avalanche: the blockchain for business

The platform is highly performant, customizable and capable of meeting the demands of enterprise-grade applications. Its flexibility and low transaction costs position it as the leading layer-1 blockchain for businesses. This month, we are going to revisit Avalanche with a specific focus on its business applications. We will touch on the technical benefits of the platform before diving into case studies and looking ahead to how Avalanche will impact industry verticals that are innovating at the forefront of web3.

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Launched by Ava Labs back in September 2020, Avalanche fundamentally rethought how blockchains should be built, with business adoption at the heart of its design. Blockchains such as Ethereum struggle with network congestion and slow transaction processing. With its innovative three-chain architecture comprising the Exchange Chain (X-Chain), Contract Chain (C-Chain), and Platform Chain (P-Chain), Avalanche delivers incredibly high speeds, processing over 4,500 transactions per second (TPS) with sub-second finality, meaning that transactions settle almost instantly. Avalanche’s C-Chain is fully compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), meaning that it supports the standard Ethereum tools such as Metamask, Truffle and Hardhat. Businesses with Ethereum-based applications or developers can also build seamlessly on Avalanche with smart contracts ported over with minimal changes. Essentially, Avalanche offers Ethereum’s capabilities without Ethereum’s technical limitations.

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When it comes to business applications, one of the most powerful features of the platform is that it allows businesses to spin up their own custom L1 chains using Avalanche technology. These are independent chains that are fully customizable to fit the business’ use case, supporting unique economic models or specific regulatory and compliance rules. A business can spin up a chain and control who can participate and how transactions are validated. Many businesses face compliance issues when it comes to the openness of public blockchains. The customization of Avalanche chains allows enterprises to fulfill data privacy requirements, governance structures and adhere to industry-specific regulations. In this way, businesses can operate with a secure and isolated environment without sacrificing the benefits of blockchain technology.

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The theoretical advantages of Avalanche are being put into practice in the real world, with both financial use cases and in industries beyond finance. On the financial side, tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) are particularly in vogue, with Avalanche becoming a hub for RWAs. In fact, we see Avalanche as quietly becoming the backbone for Wall Street’s blockchain endeavours:

• BlackRock: the world’s largest asset manager, in late 2024, expanded its USD500m+ BlackRock USD Money Market Fund (BUIDL) onto Avalanche. Tokenized via the Securitize platform, BUIDL on Avalanche became the largest tokenized money market fund, allowing qualified investors to gain digital access to a stable dollar fund with daily yields. 
• Franklin Templeton: expanded its tokenized money market fund (FOBXX) to the Avalanche network, enabling utility for investors through features like USDC-to-share conversion and peer-to-peer transfers. 
• KKR: the USD470bn private equity firm worked with Securitize to tokenize a portion of its Health Care Strategic Growth Fund II on Avalanche, opening access to that fund for a broader base of investors via blockchain.
• JPMorgan Chase: partnered with Avalanche to automate and streamline portfolio management through tokenization. Specifically, JP Morgan is using Avalanche's layer-1 architecture, along with LayerZero's network, to connect JPMorgan's Onyx blockchain platform with a permissioned Avalanche Evergreen Subnet. This allows for the tokenization of assets like WisdomTree funds, enabling automated subscriptions, redemptions, and rebalancing within portfolios.
• Grove and Janus Henderson: a USD373bn AUM asset manager leveraged Avalanche to launch two tokenized funds: the Janus Henderson Anemoy AAA CLO Fund (focused on collateralized loan obligations) and the Janus Henderson Anemoy Treasury Fund (targeting short-term U.S. Treasury bills). These initiatives aim to bring USD250m in RWAs onchain, enhancing liquidity and transparency for institutional investors. 
• Securitize: a leader in RWA tokenization, is collaborating with firms like Apollo to tokenize private credit and fixed-income assets on Avalanche. 
• Bergen County: there is a USD240bn real estate deed tokenization project on Avalanche, aiming to reduce settlement times and improve transparency in property transactions. 

Beyond the finance vertical, Avalanche is being used in a variety of sectors:

• Nexon (MapleStory Universe): The global gaming giant Nexon chose Avalanche to power its ambitious web3 gaming ecosystem, MapleStory Universe. Launched in May 2025, this creator-centric MMORPG leverages a dedicated Avalanche L1 called Henesys. It provides a seamless, high-performance environment for players and developers. The architecture ensures low latency and scalable bandwidth for large player volumes, facilitating the minting and trading of millions of NFTs with near-instant transactions. MapleStory Universe's rapid onchain activity post-launch demonstrates Avalanche's robust infrastructure for large-scale, immersive gaming experiences.
• Sports Illustrated – NFT Ticketing Platform: Sports Illustrated’s ticketing division, SI Tickets, migrated its ticketing platform, called Box Office, to Avalanche in 2023. Box Office issues event tickets as NFTs. Thanks to Avalanche’s low fees and near-instant finality, SI Tickets can mint and manage large volumes of NFT tickets without high costs, and fans receive their ticket NFTs immediately. Avalanche’s high throughput ensures smooth ticket drops for major concerts or games, and it enhances security against ticket fraud. 
• Deloitte & FEMA (Close As You Go™ - CAYG): Deloitte, one of the "Big Four" accounting firms, collaborated with Ava Labs to launch the Close As You Go (CAYG) platform. This system utilizes the Avalanche blockchain to streamline and simplify the process for state and local governments to demonstrate eligibility for federal emergency funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). CAYG improves the accuracy and efficiency of disaster reimbursement claims, reducing administrative burden and mitigating fraud. This implementation showcases Avalanche's capability to handle critical government and financial infrastructure.

Despite its strong enterprise traction, Avalanche is under-indexed by investors relative to its fundamentals. The market valuation has not caught up to the level of activity and traction on the network. Avalanche’s circulating market cap is around USD10bn, making it a top 20 crypto asset. By comparison, Ethereum’s market cap is almost USD500bn and Solana sits at around USD100bn. Yet, looking at network metrics and adoption, while smaller than Ethereum and Solana, Avalanche is competitive with these networks and growing rapidly. For example, Avalanche’s total value locked (TVL) on the network was around USD700m in July 2024 and today is at USD1.9bn, representing growth of over +170%. This compares to Ethereum’s TVL growth of +60% and Solana’s TVL growth of +100% over the same period. Similarly, Avalanche has seen user growth of +140% over the last year, compared to around +40% user growth for Ethereum.

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Avalanche is a hidden champion amongst smart contract platforms and its institutional adoption will lead to substantial growth of the platform. The team behind Avalanche has been heavily focused on enterprise partnerships through initiatives like the Avalanche9000 upgrade, which we wrote about last year. The Avalanche Foundation has also run initiatives such as Avalanche Multiverse, which was a USD290m incentive program focused on accelerating the adoption and growth of Avalanche L1s. This program supported new ecosystems in gaming, DeFi, NFTs and institutional use cases. While these initiatives will support ecosystem growth, it will be institutional adoption that will make the most impact. For example, in February this year, an Avalanche Card was launched in partnership with Visa, aimed at broadening crypto use in regions with banking challenges. One such region is Latin America, where the Avalanche Foundation is putting particular focus and where Avalanche held its annual summit in 2024.

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Institutional momentum will lead to greater adoption, which will increase demand for the AVAX token. As banks and asset managers integrate with Avalanche, they will require AVAX for securing subnets (Avalanche L1s) and paying transaction fees, tying increased adoption directly to token utility. A virtuous cycle is starting. As more blue-chip partners and institutions build on Avalanche, network effects deepen and AVAX’s role in the ecosystem expands. The token is currently priced at around USD23, but this is down over 80% from its all-time high of USD146. Today marks a great entry price for a platform with such substantial growth potential and trading with a market cap of only 2% the size of Ethereum. There is significant upside to holding AVAX.

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At CMCC Global, we hold an AVAX position in both of our Digital Asset Funds, Fund 4 and Fund 3B. In addition, we hold an illiquid and discounted AVAX position through our Titan Fund. We also run a dedicated Avalanche fund called the Everest Fund that provides exposure to both AVAX and the Avalanche ecosystem more broadly. Through Everest, we have been supporting project teams that are building on Avalanche and by doing so have had first-hand access to everything going on in this bubbling ecosystem. The new opportunities that we are seeing, many of which have not yet hit the market, give us added confidence that Avalanche is somewhere to continue focusing our attention and capital.