Ava Labs chief declines to call Avalanche an Ethereum competitor

The cryptocurrency industry is still too small to compare large projects. Yet such an approach can be useful when describing the product being built, said Ava Labs president John Wu on the podcast Decrypt.

The startup behind Avalanche—the open-source platform for launching decentralized applications, public and private blockchains—does not consider itself an Ethereum competitor, Wu said.

“It’s always easier to compare with someone who has done so well, and Ethereum has done a great job,” he said.

According to CoinGecko, at the time of writing the native token AVAX was ranked 12th by market capitalization with a value of $18.8 billion. In November 2021 the coin reached an all-time high above $110, despite the broader market correction.

The president of Ava Labs said he tries not to pay attention to the daily price.

“But we are operators, builders; we care about adoption in the network, we care about user experience, and we care about dapps and developers entering the ecosystem,” Wu added.

According to DappRadar, Avalanche hosts 275 dapps mostly in gaming and DeFi. By the amount of locked funds (data from DeFi Llama) the network ranks fourth with $10.2 billion.

Earlier, the Avalanche Foundation, affiliated with the project, launched a developer incentive program worth $290 million and a $100 million fund for entertainment projects.

As reported in April 2022, Bloomberg sources said that Ava Labs opened a financing round of $350 million at a valuation of $5.25 billion.

In September 2021 the Avalanche Foundation raised $230 million in a private token sale. The financing was led by Polychain Capital and Three Arrows Capital.

In 2020, Ava Labs raised $12 million in a private token sale and $42 million in a public sale. The Avalanche mainnet launch took place on September 22, 2020.

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