The AVAX native token for the layer-1 blockchain Avalanche is in severe pain this weekend, slumping more than 10% at one point in a fall to its lowest level since December 2023.
Over the past 24 hours, the token has crashed from $27.87 to an intraday and six-month low of $24.92, according to CoinGecko.
Moreover, the asset has dropped a whopping 37% over the past month as altcoins continue to get crushed in the crypto market pullback.
What Has Caused the AVAX Avalanche?
“What’s going on there?” asked ‘Crypto Mechanic’ in a post on X on June 22, before adding it is “the first high cap coin that broke the [yearly] low, I think.”
“AVAX hype is so far gone this cycle… It looks like nothing will save it from becoming Cardano 2.0,” commented ‘The Crypto Monk.’
Meanwhile, the head of research at Uphold, Dr Martin Hiesboeck, said, “the price of AVAX going downhill like an avalanche makes no sense.”
“Nobody comparable has this growth momentum,” he said in reference to Avalanche volumes. Additionally, major game developer Konami is reportedly launching an NFT platform called Resella, built on the Avalanche blockchain.
This is huge. The price of $Avax going downhill like an avalanche makes no sense. Total volume on avalanche is over $18 billion since the start of the year. Nobody comparable has this growth momentum. And now a major game developer Avalanche must be the most underestimated… https://t.co/jNqrKsovHC
— Dr Martin Hiesboeck (@MHiesboeck) June 22, 2024
According to blockchain sleuth ‘ZachXBT,’ a whale has been moving large amounts of the asset to centralized exchanges. The entity started transferring 1.96 million AVAX worth around $54.2 million to Coinbase, Binance, Gate, and bridging via THORChain, he said in an investigations post on Telegram on June 22.
The massive move has resulted in AVAX’s market cap falling below $10 billion and its ranking dropping to fourteenth, below Shiba Inu (SHIB) and Tron (TRX), according to CoinGecko.
Avalanche has been the center of crypto hype this year for real-world asset (RWA) tokenization narratives and several major partnerships.
The asset tapped $60 in the mid-March market rally, but it remains down 83% from its November 2021 all-time high of $145.
Other Altcoins in Pain
Altcoins continue to bleed out as crypto markets keep correcting. Total capitalization has fallen 15% from its 2024 high and is currently down 20% from its 2021 all-time high.
Altcoins are taking the brunt of this pain at the moment, with Cardano (ADA), Chainlink (LINK), Near Protocol (NEAR), Polygon (MATIC), and Fetch.ai (FET) falling deeper into the red this weekend.