Both Near Protocol’s NEAR and Avalanche’s native token AVAX maintained their strong starts on Friday while the overall market pared its gains from earlier in the week, following the lead from stocks.
As of press time, AVAX had gained 8.2% over the previous 24 hours, while NEAR was up 6%. In the meantime, ether has dropped 3.3% and is trading for less than $2,000, while bitcoin has dropped 2.5% over the past day, trading below $36,500.
Investor interest in Avalanche’s native token AVAX was probably piqued by the company’s inclusion in Project Guardian, the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s (MAS) tokenization initiative.
According to announcements from Avalance and the MAS, Onyx by J.P. Morgan and Apollo Global demonstrated a blockchain Proof of Concept for revolutionising asset management under MAS’s Project Guardian, paralleling Citi’s use of similar technology for FX trade simulations. JP Morgan’s blockchain-powered fixed-income trading network is called Onyx.
The aforementioned demonstrations highlight the potential of tokenization and smart contracts to improve and automate financial services’ efficiency and scalability. This is in line with the Singaporean regulator’s objective of leveraging blockchain technology for FinTech purposes rather than cryptocurrency. In the meantime, NEAR most likely benefited from several encouraging announcements made at the Nearcon conference.
There were notable leveraged position liquidations in other places due to the fall in market leaders. According to Coinglass data, long bitcoin positions worth $48 million were liquidated in a day, whereas long ether positions worth $30 million were liquidated in the same time frame.